The reason sets are important is that they correspond to (Boolean-valued) properties. To each set, there corresponds the property of belonging to that set. To e

The reason sets are important is that they correspond to (Boolean-valued) properties. To each set, there corresponds the property of belonging to that set. To each property, there corresponds the set of all things with that property. I think this is the key reason why the relational algebra is a good foundation for a query language. When I'm writing a query, I'm thinking of some property P, such that I want the results of the query to be all records with property P. By utilizing the correspondence between properties and sets I can translate that property fairly directly into an expression in the relational algebra, and then the magic of a relational query language is that that expression is all I need to write to carry out the query. That's the sense in which relational query languages are declarative. I just write down the property of the results I want, and I get those results automatically without having to specify how to collect those results. Having queries return multisets rather than sets "breaks" the relational algebra in the sense that it breaks this correspondence. Results of queries no longer correspond one-to-one to properties, since properties have no multiplicity. To be fair, you can identify the property being true or the element belonging to the set with having multiplicity > 0, and the property being false or the element not belonging to the set with having multiplicity 0, and by doing this you can think of SQL queries as corresponding to sets/properties most of the time. But if you're going to think of them that way, you might as well just have them be sets in the first place. The multisets are just a needless complication. Thinking about SQL queries in terms of multisets seems to only be compatible with a more imperative, non-relational approach to the language, where you still have to think algorithmically about how to assemble the collection of results that you want, rather than just directly characterizing the results in terms of a property.