Rethinking SQL: What a Modern Relational Query Language Should Look Like

Things I want in a modern relational query language

A long-dormant draft revived by the recent Acadia discussion argues that SQL's core ideas are sound but its implementations are archaic. The author, drawing on years of MySQL and Db2 experience, proposes improvements: better syntax and parsers, functional programming support, more transparent query planners, richer user-defined types, sum types with pattern matching, and foreign keys that can reference multiple tables via discriminated unions. Concrete examples from IBM i system administration illustrate how these features would reduce verbosity and errors.