I'm not familiar with Ecto, dplyr, or DBT, but I would love an ML-like language to replace SQL. I'm imagining being able to pass a table (or any table-oriented data, like a sub-query) to functions that would type-check columns and would return table-oriented or scalar data. I'm not sure if this is actually possible in practice, but one can dream.

For instance, a "top 10" function that could be re-used on any table (apologies for my pseudo types and code):

  selectTop10 : Column -> Table -> Table
  selectTop10 orderByColumn table =
    SQL.selectAllFrom table
    |> orderDescBy orderByColumn
    |> limit 10

  limit : Int -> Table -> Table
  limit n rows =
    SQL.limitBy n rows

  orderDescBy : Column -> Table -> Table
  orderDescBy orderByColumn rows =
    SQL.orderBy [orderByColumn] SQL.Ordering.Desc rows