The article “Abstraction Tiers of Notations, Part 1” introduced abstraction tier concept, and in the article “Birth of New Generation of Programming Languages? Part 2,” I have tried to apply it to the evolution of the general-purpose programming languages. However, this framework is applicable to domain-specific languages as well. Let’s consider one of the most popular domains, where DSLs are widely used: data manipulation languages.
Current State
Firstly, let’s briefly examine current technologies available on the market. We will consider only employed abstraction tiers of data manipulation language for the database technologies while ignoring other aspects like distribution models, transaction support, or performance. While these aspects are very important for technology selection, they are orthogonal to the supported abstraction tiers.