Bulk structures play a central role in data-intensive application programming. The issues of bulk type definition and implementation as well as their integration into database programming languages are, therefore, key topics in current DBPL research. In this paper we raise a more general language design and implementation issue by asking whether there should be at all built-in bulk types in DBPLs. Instead, one could argue that bulk types should be realized exclusively as user-definable add-ons to unbiased core languages with appropriate primitives and abstraction facilities. In searching for an answer we first distinguish two substantially different levels on which bulk types are supported. Elementary Bulk essentially copes with persistent storage of mass data, their identification and update. Advanced Bulk provides additional support required for data-intensive applications such as optimized associatve queries and integrity support under concurrency and failure. Our long-term experience with bulk types in the DBPL language and system clearly shows the limitation of the built-in approach: built-in Advanced Bulk, as elaborate as it may be, frequently does not cover the whose range of demands of a fully-fledged application and often does not provide a decent pay-off for its implementation effort. On the other hand, restriction to built-in Elementary Bulk gives too little user-support for most data-intensive applications. We report our current work on open database application systems which favours DBPLs with bulk types as add-ons, and outline some of the technological requirements for highly reusable implementations of languages with advanced user-provided bulk type definitions.