A better language than SQL in front of Postgres' careful and mature data storage engine?
What would you expect from a language improvement point of view? Its a declarative language so you can't expect a load of object oriented features. I found that once I learned to think in sets, the language doesn't bother me. There is a certain simplicity to it, that is fairly elegant.
I'm sure an specification is gladly appreciated.
The requirements list for any "D" (that is, the definition of membership in the class of languages) is here in The Third Manifesto: http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~hugh/TTM/TTM-2013-02-07.pdf
- Structured rows to kill all grouping special cases and the distinction between where and having.
- Hierarchical rows so that join(Planet, Person) doesn't repeat Planet columns in each returned row.
Linq already gets you 1 and 2. See http://www.linqpad.net/WhyLINQBeatsSQL.aspx Xml gets you 3.