It's more than just being a string though, it's the multiple incompatible versions and the stunted mini language of it's own. A good solution would be able to run arbitrary expressions in some "real" programming language. It also in my experience doesn't seem to deliver on its central premise of converting declarative expressions to fast operations. So often in a SP I've had to force a write to an intermediate table to jimmy the execution plan. I think it's like excel, it's not considered good because the thing itself is good it seems good because the thing it does is very useful (lightweight interactive dataflow programming, talking to relational databases) and it has a near monopoly. LINQ is really cool but doesn't exist in python (macropython has an unused attempt PINQ I think). Probably because a) SQL is bad b) only MS actually has the definition of the mssql language!