Most programmers think the XQuery language was developed to satisfy a niche market: A data querying and transformation language designed to handle XML data. In the case of relational databases, the prevailing practice is to use SQL for non-XML data and use XQuery for XML. This article makes the case that the powerful programming constructs available in the XQuery language make it a better programming language than SQL, and that this improvement in expressiveness and ease of use is enough to warrant the design of databases with an increasing emphasis on XML data types.