Comment by unfocussed_mike

My SQL life is seemingly dominated by correlated subqueries and self-joins where the join checks another row does _not_ exist (the row R with the largest column X is the one where there is no row R1 with a larger X1).

I don't believe SQL queries like these can be improved by a metalanguage. They _can_ be meaningfully improved by indentation, whitespace, careful naming and detailed comments.