I'm having trouble justifying semantics that return rows which havn't been inserted or updated. Actually, I find SQL pretty nice. It's strongly typed in non-My

I'm having trouble justifying semantics that return rows which havn't been inserted or updated. Actually, I find SQL pretty nice. It's strongly typed in non-MySQL engines. It's pretty expressive, and can be highly optimized without having to update queries. Analytical features found in non-MySQL databases such as windows are also invaluable for many types of analysis. The biggest issue I've ever had is that nesting queries when doing some analytical work can be a pain. WITH does handle this to some extent, but it doesn't seem quite as nice as something like PIG where results an "flow" through the query. The other issue is transformations like pivot tables where you don't know the column names ahead of time. pg has extensions for that, but they aren't quite as nice as a native SQL solution would be.