I did some contract work for a company called Akiban, which was bought by FoundationDB, which was bought by Apple that took the whole product off the market at

I did some contract work for a company called Akiban, which was bought by FoundationDB, which was bought by Apple that took the whole product off the market at the time. What Akiban offered was SQL with an extra datatype called a "nested result set", the idea here seems similar if not more generalized; you didn't need a traditional join anymore and your ORM-like library could build up hierarchical models from a single SELECT statement that included nested queries. there is still logic in SQLAlchemy to accommodate this concept.