SQL's just so much more flexible than the competing query languages, there's not a true alternative to it. One syntax does a decent job for transactional proces

SQL's just so much more flexible than the competing query languages, there's not a true alternative to it. One syntax does a decent job for transactional processing, key/value tables, heavily relational data, massive analytical processing, data warehousing, etc. It's pretty ugly, but it's flexible enough that you can get the job done even if you need to do something complex.