at the risk of sounding not very important:

I'd very much like to see 3 changes in the sql language taken from Oracle (I know, I know, I said the O word)

1. CREATE and ALTER:

instead of CREATE view/table/whatever:

and ALTER view/table/whatever:

in 1 statement

CREATE OR ALTER... (as oracle's CREATE OR REPLACE)

2. cursor functionality:

instead of :

declare @var1 nvarchar(10)

declare cur cursor for select myColumn from myTable

open cur

fetch next from cur into @var1

etc, etc

this is much handier:

declare cur cursor for select myColumn from myTable

for rec in cur

print rec.myColumnName

loop

3. detecting the type from table definition

eg:

MyTable has a myColumn nvarchar(10)

a stupid insert procedure would have to declare the paramter as nvarchar(10)

eg: create myProc (@col1 nvarchar(10)) ...

--> create myProce (@col1 MyTable.MyColumn%TYPE)

when the type of myColumn changes there is no need to change the procedure!

anyway, minor changes but they could make my life a bit easier