alt Hacker NewsSome overlap here with some of my favorite essays on why SQL is lacking:
https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/against-sql
That particular post ends with a wish-list of items so it's the most similar to the OP. But there are others on the site that I quite enjoy (click on the home icon and search "SQL" on the page).
My personal take is that SQL will continue to reign for a long time because of the how monumental the task of replacing it is due to the inherent complexity of databases. LLMs make this worse because they're really good at translating prose to SQL. Now that it matters less how annoying SQL is to programmers, SQL will become more like assembly over time: something mostly computers write because it's complicated for humans to deal with directly. This is deeply ironic given that SQL was ostensibly designed to read like prose, i.e. to be easy for humans.
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LLMs are also very good at writing code for newly invented languages, especially if they can execute it and iterate. I strongly believe the barrier to switch languages is lowered in a post LLM world.
Ten years ago I was at a startup where we used Datomic, and it was okay, but six months in the sales team was like “ok how do I run SQL queries so I can triage leads”. We had no answer of course.
Today it would simply be: type what you want in natural language and we’ll generate the query with Claude.
I just tried one representative query from that startup against a hypothetical datalog query tool in Rust and it did just fine.
Rawdogging SQL when you're not a seasoned DB administrator basically makes an arcane art look occult.
Most people reach out towards an ORM or query building engine and otherwise don't really go far beyond the basic CRUD, joins, and some simple aggregations with groups. Since they try to be DB agnostic you'll rarely get an adaptor over CTEs or window functions or partitioning.
An LLM is great at exposing what a database is capable of doing with SQL and might even manage to navigate the most poorly designed of schemas. And it might even manage to design one to an acceptable standard if it has enough domain knowledge in its context.