Against SQL
I do love SQL and at least where I live (MS SQL Server) it can be made to run amazingly fast if you take some care with your queries and indexes. It&#x27;s not portable though: as far as I know not a single one of the big sql vendors follows the standards 100% and more importantly, spending some time with one vendor will give you some habits that are sure to not work as well with another (cursor constructs are generally a death blow to performance in tsql but they are <i>the way to do it</i> on oracle for example). So I kind of agree with the author here.<p>But I also feel that maybe they are asking a bit much from SQL. The complaint that complex subqueries are complex... Well then don&#x27;t use them? I would use WITH constructs in that situation because I find them easier to read but that&#x27;s beside the point. I think its perfectly fine to pull out multiple result sets from simple queries and then do the complex stuff in your host language.