The legacy Sybase functions reflect a COBOL mentality, and not an SQL or RDBMS model the world. You mentioned that the CONVERT() allows formatting; but what's the rule about doing display formatting in the database in RDBMS? You don't do it. And that's why you have a presentation layer. I've always loved seeing people having to unconvert dates because the office in the UK and the office in the US and the office in the EU decided to use this "feature" to put their data in a local dialect. The definition of a CAST() comes out of the standards and behaves the same way (well in theory), no matter which SQL engine it's in.

COBOL has a PICTURE clause for the fields in its records. This clause, as the punctuation, and other display edits because COBOL has only one tier. Nobody thought about client/server back then. This is the reason the Sybase MONEY types behave the way they do; don't scare the COBOL programmers

COALESCE () Can take a list of expressions and it will return a result with highest the data type, while the old ISNULL() is limited to parameters and it returns the data type of the first one.

The SELECT… UNION ALL is just awful and bulky. It also perverts how the SELECT..FROM statement is supposed to work in SQL. I probably would never insert 1000 rows in a single insertion statement; there much better tools for large amounts of data.

One of my favorite examples of a getting caught on proprietary dialect versus standard SQL was the old BIT data type. It was originally defined as {0,1} just as computer science type would think. A little BIT later Microsoft changed their mind and it became a numeric data type. All numeric datatypes have to take a NULL. Somebody who didn't put an explicit NOT NULL constraint on the old BIT columns got some really nice surprises. This point out another little problem when you write with proprietary syntax all the proprietors are perfectly free to change its definition from one release to the next. They do no have to match anyone else! When you write with ANSI/ISO standards, is an awful lot harder to change things and when they are changed, it shows up in the trade press.