[butlerm]

The main application for this is where you have detail data for parent records in a snowflake pattern. In that case SQL tends to require a ridiculous number of queries, where common formats like JSON and XML are capable of transferring hierarchical data like that in a single response. That is a major weakness of SQL and the common inability to return a hierarchical set of relations in one response in particular.

Also, running a ridiculous number of queries in parallel is not practical on many databases due to per connection overhead, a problem that is so severe that many databases have internal many-to-one connection demultiplexers already, i.e. they have N execution engines for M connections. That should sound familiar to those who are familiar with threading models.