It's interesting to note that CLR integration does NOT necessarily "[move] things from a set based model to a row by row based, procedural model." Indeed, I'm wondering how many people who make that claim have actually coded a SQL CLR stored procedure?

So here it is: You STILL NEED TO USE T-SQL. None of the set-based semantics change. What changes is that you can more easily integrate other types of data sources, e.g. web services or flat files (note, I don't think this is a good idea in 99.9999% of cases -- I don't like the idea of SQL Server waiting on a web service). But to access data in tables, you will use T-SQL. You simply can't code data access in pure C# or VB.NET. This is an urban legend from MS marketing that's gone far enough!

But CLR stored procedures are just one small, and in my opinion fairly useless, part. The interesting stuff is CLR UDFs, CLR UDTs, and CLR Aggregates. None of those (except perhaps aggregates) have ANY affect on the "set based model", and indeed aggregates will help us to create better set-based solutions to difficult problems that require cursors or undefined operations (read: aggregate concatenation) today.

UDTs are a really great extension -- we can finally define types that actually behave as they're supposed to. How do you currently store a phone number? And what happens when you do PhoneNumber + PhoneNumber? What does that really MEAN anyway? UDTs eliminate these issues quite well.

And UDFs, while only slightly more useful than user-defined stored procedures, are also a good extension for those rare times when the CLR just does something better than TSQL can -- e.g. heavy mathematical operations. These are really no different than TSQL 'native' UDFs from a set-based point of view -- do you object to those?

MS marketing has done a great job of telling everyone how T-SQL will go away (false) and has failed to highlight the really useful features that CLR integration provides... Now every developer wants to go write a bunch of CLR stored procedures and has no idea where the good stuff is. Great job, MS!