Agreed. But we need competitors to seed the next generation. I agree any decent SQL competitor is not going to unseat SQL in the short-term in the general indus

Agreed. But we need competitors to seed the next generation. I agree any decent SQL competitor is not going to unseat SQL in the short-term in the general industry, but experimental and specialized projects would use them and gradually improve them. This approach has worked in the empirical language space, which had/has hundreds of active competitors, but RDBMS-land is sparse. Somebody pointed out that one can create user-defined functions in most SQL dialects, but that's generally for the value level, not the table label. It's still too dependent on per-case key-words for table-level features. I don't believe this is an inherent limit of declarative languages, as the SMEQL drafts suggest.