I spent years writing ad-hoc SQL, and had no occasion to learn about or use ORMs, but I did dabble a little in T-SQL and PL/SQL, and they just seemed wrong to m

I spent years writing ad-hoc SQL, and had no occasion to learn about or use ORMs, but I did dabble a little in T-SQL and PL/SQL, and they just seemed wrong to me. Not integrated in a clean manner, not derived from a single vision, and so on. I guess what people call an "impedance mismatch". There is excessive overhead just from switching from SQL to the imperative language. I've gotten four orders of magnitude speedup by reformulating a T-SQL script as a single SQL query. But recently I learned about Power Query (the "M" language standing for Mashup) and I immediately wanted so badly for SQL to acquire all the good aspects of it. Not as a separate module, but perhaps as a successor language. In particular, the way it allows functions (and higher-order functions) to be defined is wonderful. Many people don't like SQL, but I never had the feeling that here is what it's missing until now. I qualify my comments above by mentioning I have no experience with OLTP or in general SQL that needs to be performant on the millisecond to second timescale. Instead, I've always been working with queries on the basis that they need to run in 5 minutes, or ten, or fifteen, or an hour, as opposed to a day, or a week, or a month.