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I'm making a relational lang (https://tablam.org) and this was one of the question marks for me.
The #1 reason sum types was not presented is because "nobody" thought (seriously) about that for long time. See how much "null" have been with us and still you find defenders of it!
The second and more broad problem, is that the relational model was NOT implemented by the RDBMS makers, not in full. To make sum types work, you NEED to support embed relations inside relations:
rel Invoice
https://leanpub.com/how-query-engines-work. It covers a fair chunk of DB technology but not storage. Definitely check out their repository at https://github.com/andygrove/how-query-engines-work/tree/mai... .
A companion to DDIA would be https://www.amazon.com/Database-Internals-Deep-Distributed-S... (especially its treatment of LSM trees which is harder to come by).