One of the things I was really excited about with the Drizzle MySQL fork a long time ago was how they were planning to make the server side SQL language supported through plugins. Being able to use the same language on the front-end and for stored procedures would be really nice. For me, that's Perl, but for a lot of people it's probably Python, Ruby, Java or some JVM, derivative, etc. To be sure, there are downsides (not the least of which is making it easier to load a lot of logic on the SQL server which may be much harder to scale if you aren't careful), but it would also make it much easier to do some complex SQL operations.