Very happy to see all of this talk over the past few months on the power of modern--or anything beyond basic--SQL.

This article touches on one of my favorite things, too, which is built-in date and time arithmetic. That's something that basically just works and comes for free in the database but is often a hodgepodge of messy third-party libraries elsewhere.

The other enormous one, for me at least, is arbitrary precision math. Proper precision, rounding, division, and exponentiation isn't easy to come by. I'm so tired of dealing with libmpdec, BigDecimal (flimsy as it is), GMP, etc. It all works well in the database and it's pretty fast. Perhaps it's not suitable to 1000-digit scale scientific computing, but it sure does make building financial software easy.