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Something probably to fuel the debate on Stored procedures versus Dynamic SQL.

Ted Neward propose simply to implement some database relational functions in the language.

The idea of transacted code seems to be futuristic but why not ?

x = 5;
transacted
{
  x += 5;
  throw new IllegalArgumentException("can't do this!");
}
finally // a.k.a. commit
{
  printOut("We committed! x = " + x);
}
rollback
{
  printOut("We rolled back! x = " + x);
}

// x has the value "5", since the exception forces an implicit rollback

A bit freaky to see this kind of mix:

What I want is primitive types that understand the relational and hierarchical data models intuitively and allow me to exercise those operators as a first-class language concept.

At this point, I have no real idea how you would make all this work, but I envision something along the lines of:

relvar r = { fn, ln, age} [ ["Ted", "Neward", 32] ["Don", "Box", 39] ];
foreach (tuple t in r)
{
  printOut("Name is " + t.fn + " " + t.ln + ", " + t.age + " years old");
}

relvar r2 = { fn, ln, age} [ ["Fritz", "Onion", 39] ];
relvar r3 = r UNION r2;
printOut(r3.count); // Prints "3", since there are 3 tuples