Your example is actually a pet peeve of mine. SQL is not at all a nice DSL for working with relational databases programmatically. When you think of it as an AP

Your example is actually a pet peeve of mine. SQL is not at all a nice DSL for working with relational databases programmatically. When you think of it as an API, it exposes one method that takes one gigantic string parameter. API design doesn't get much worse than that. A sane relational database API would let you compose and extend arbitrary queries, which has profound implications for the way you can write your program and abstract away repeated patterns. [Arel](https://github.com/nkallen/arel https://github.com/nkallen/arel) has the right idea in terms of API, but a poor implementation (lots of things are not truly composable where they should be). [ScalaQuery](http://www.scalaquery.org/ http://www.scalaquery.org/) purports to have the right idea, but I haven't tried it, and it's very Scala-centric.