By "lack of a good composition mechanism," are you referring to the trappings of writing and dealing with SQL syntax itself? As in, "Ugh. I decided to change

By "lack of a good composition mechanism," are you referring to the trappings of writing and dealing with SQL syntax itself? As in, "Ugh. I decided to change this join into a subquery, and now my @#$#% parentheses are imbalanced!"? If so, I agree strongly, but I feel like that problem could be solved by better error reporting on the part of the compiler. I dread SQL errors now, at least with Oracle (which I work with the most often), because they almost never tell me what I need to know. To a certain extent it's essential to the abstraction of data reporting itself, but certain errors are just comically vague.