SQL is a DSL indeed, but building SQL strings programmatically is an awful idea. You should build SQL queries structurally. The DSL to build SQL should basicall

SQL is a DSL indeed, but building SQL strings programmatically is an awful idea. You should build SQL queries structurally. The DSL to build SQL should basically be a mirror of the SQL DSL in the host language. The DSL will guarantee that you cannot build malformed queries. It can also give guarantees you design it to give. I'm not talking about replicating a database -- but just wrapping its API nicely in a type-safe manner. I am proposing wrapping type-unsafe APIs with type-safe API's. This adds complexity in the sense of enlarging the implementation. But it also adds safety and guarantees to all user code.