I seem to remember a few years ago, some of the mainstream RDBMS vendors (Oracle and Sybase) were extending their products so stored procs could be written in Java -- and a nice side effect was they did it in such a way that stored procs could be written in almost any language. Sybase's attempt was called ESP and there were some rumblings about perl being in the mix. I don't think the extensions (even Java) ever really took off. Maybe the core programmers doing stored proc development never had a vested interest in learning anything other than T-SQL or PL/SQL or maybe products like DBI, ODBC and JDBC scratch more than 80% of the itch.