I wonder about this too. It seems like some ideas from category theory and pure functional programming could really help here to provide an abstraction over the top of the (pseudo)relational model.

While doing some research on an unrelated topic, I stumbled on some potentially related work [1, 2, 3] by some researchers at MIT that could be relevant to database deployment/migration (I haven't checked in depth yet). I have not had a chance to sink into these references to see if there is any relevance or promise there, though it looks like there is some kind of commercialization effort [4].

[1] Patrick Schultz et al. Algebraic Databases. http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03501

[2] David Spivak. Functorial Data Migration. http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.1166

[3] http://categoricaldata.net/

[4] http://www.catinf.com/