There has been some talk of making Perl 6 RDBMS friendly by taking advantage of their conceptual intersections. The end result would be that what you ordinarily express as SQL could be expressed in Perl natively. I don't know how far beyond talk this has gone exactly as I haven't kept up with it. But it seems interesting given that even if, as some believe, Perl 6 never gets here, many Perl 6 concepts filter their way back into Perl 5. (Maybe the design of DBI2 will be influenced. Maybe Perl 5 will get native SQLian constructs. Who knows?)