part of the reason for a query optimizer is that if the physical representation of the data changes, the queries don't need to change. And that's a great reaso

part of the reason for a query optimizer is that if the physical representation of the data changes, the queries don't need to change. And that's a great reason to use the declarative query as the default. What I'm complaining about is when you need to eek out the last bit of performance out of a query, there should be another option. Sort of like dropping into assembly to optimize a tight loop. Of course you don't want to write the entire program in assembly. you need the DB's type system to be distinct from any of the client language's type systems. I don't agree. Just because your DB's type system uses say, Java, doesn't mean that other languages can't access the DB. Non-Java languages would access the DB the same way they do today, but at least the Java developers wouldn't have to convert.