SQL is popular because for many classes of problems it is awesome and uses a very powerful abstraction (tables) and query language. Most implementations are als

SQL is popular because for many classes of problems it is awesome and uses a very powerful abstraction (tables) and query language. Most implementations are also very robust and able to provide very interesting guarantees (like ACID). The only problem of SQL was that the computer industry was trying to solve everything with SQL databases, that is not a good idea. It's good that there are other databases now, but I don't think SQL is going to face away. For instance many NoSQL databases like MongoDB, RethinkDB, may well be SQL databases with different implementation tradeoffs but just picked a different query language because... well because... I don't know why honestly. Not that's a problem but the model is very very similar to objects with fields (tables) I can query.