The LogicBlox smart database system brings together transaction processing, business logic, analytics, live programming and machine learning in one integrated environment. Several of our technical achievements have come about by adapting techniques from programming languages for databases. In this talk I will give an overview of the LogicBlox system, then focus on our approach to parallel transaction processing. Called ‘Transaction Repair,’ it is a method for scalable transaction processing without locks that achieves full serializability. It can demonstrate parallel speedup even in inimical scenarios where all pairs of transactions have significant read-write conflicts. It builds on established techniques from programming languages: declarative languages, purely functional data structures, incremental computation, and fixpoint analysis.