I agree with your overall theme: SQL is not composable. On the UPDATE front, some implementations (e.g., PostgreSQL) do allow tuple/row assignment, which does m

I agree with your overall theme: SQL is not composable. On the UPDATE front, some implementations (e.g., PostgreSQL) do allow tuple/row assignment, which does make things a bit nicer. (Small conveniences can make things better, while not perfect.) UPDATE customer SET (membership_plan, timezone) = ('PLATINUM', 'UTC") -- ... I tend to use row comparison and assignment where possible (in JOIN clauses, UPDATE statements, and WHERE clauses) to reinforce thinking in tuples, where a single column is the degenerate case (though I do then omit the surrounding parens).