>but there are plenty of valid reasons to dislike it The reason why I don't like SQL much, is not because of SQL itself, but because of its poor fit into the h

>but there are plenty of valid reasons to dislike it The reason why I don't like SQL much, is not because of SQL itself, but because of its poor fit into the host programming language. In PL-SQL, Oracle's own programming language, the SQL statements are simply part of the program. That is how it should be. But in other languages (like Perl), the SQL is like code you need to `eval` at runtime. There is no syntax check until you actually run it. And that makes it cumbersome to work with. Plus, you often have to do optimizations (like to separate `prepare` from the rest of the code) by hand, which only makes it worse. It's all just very low level.