SQL would have looked different back in the 1970s if it had been designed from scratch. In fact it was. One example was QUEL, the query language for Ingres, whi

SQL would have looked different back in the 1970s if it had been designed from scratch. In fact it was. One example was QUEL, the query language for Ingres, which was an influential RDBMS developed at UC Berkeley by Stonebraker and Wang. [0, 1] So far none of the many attempts to develop a different language has succeeded. IMHO the only way SQL will be replaced is if some variant becomes dominant because of a strong implementation that extends the language in useful ways, kind of how Latin turned in to French in the Middle Ages. Open source databases like MySQL and ClickHouse that ignore SQL standards BS and just put in useful features have shown the way. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_(database) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_(database)