I believe what they’re talking about is being able to pass something like a struct of key-value pairs, which correspond to column names in the inserted table. This would let us pass straight records/maps/whatever you want to call them to the db, and have the correct insert performed, instead of the genuinely horrible string-interpolation-hope-you-got-the-right-number-of-params-in-the-right-order-and-too-bad-if-you-didn’t dance that we currently have.

The interface we have with databases could be so much better.

I think they were talking about syntax like INSERT INTO t(a,b,c) VALUES (1,2,3)

I agree that something like INSERT INTO t VALUES a=1, b=2, c=3

would be much more readable.

Interestingly enough, I've toyed with augmenting SQL to make it more useful.

I remember doing an experimental improvement allowing to do FROM where SELECT what syntax.

I agree there's value there. Omnigres is able to intercept query expressions to do the augmentation.