I question the sensibility of having the primary interface to a database be a query language as such; It's a pain to work with programmatically. I agree with th

I question the sensibility of having the primary interface to a database be a query language as such; It's a pain to work with programmatically. I agree with the notion of starting from relational algebra, but rather than the interface being a human-oriented textual syntax, the protocol should be defined in terms of some widely supported serialization format (take your pick). This makes it easier to write query-builder libraries, which the humans can use. You really don't want to be doing string substitution to put queries together.