Languages: we may be easily misled by analogies, but still, I'd try to defend my point: you are forced to use SQL only and only because the DB infrastructure ca

Languages: we may be easily misled by analogies, but still, I'd try to defend my point: you are forced to use SQL only and only because the DB infrastructure can't understand your (presumably imperative) way of describing operations on large data sets. But you are just wrong arguing that relational databases are glorified arrays full of pointers and examples of premature optimization. I think the relational concepts are just a subset of what you can do with various kinds of collections in imperative languages - arrays, sets, maps. For example, I can have an array of records describing users, each of which incorporates a set of groups a user belongs to. In DB terms that's 3 tables (users, groups and membership) with one-to-many relations between them. Either way, we are describing the same concept of users and their membership in various groups. So why bother having another language?