> People who work with it all the time, don't even think about it past the first week.
I think SQL is often quite awkward, at least when you look at people exploring alternatives, like https://prql-lang.org/
Not just “the standard” variety, but also all of the vendor specific varieties that you’ll use in practice (MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle, SQL Server etc.) and how the features offered by each differ, how the support for custom types differs, how the procedural languages differ, the actual experience of using them, seemingly half baked error messages when compared to most imperative languages, varying support for getting the query optimiser to do what you want (e.g. hints), query plans that aren’t pleasant to stare at, often no support for automated analysis of how things are running and suggestions for indices (e.g. Oracle had that sort of feature, it is sometimes helpful, but the automatically generated indices are or at least last I checked were treated as their own special thing and you couldn’t easily delete them). Even things like varying support for working with geospatial data, JSON or time series data.
Not just that, but also the tooling (or the lack of it) - good luck debugging the execution of stored procedures in your DB or placing breakpoints in there, good luck hooking up observability/tracing solutions as easily as you would for your back end, good luck debugging why your database link calls take 100x longer when executed through JDBC in your app but not in the developer tooling.
Not that ORMs or NoSQL make everything much better, you’d just trade one set of annoyances for another, especially when you end up trying to generate dynamic SQL with the likes of myBatis XML mappers. Don’t get me started on people over fetching or ending up with N+1 problems with most ORMs, or executing bunches of queries against the DB just to retrieve some data that you might as well get in one go with a well crafted DB view. Not that you can’t make your DB schema a mess as well with a liberal application of EAV or OTLT (or just attempting to make polymorphic links).
I think SQL as a language makes sense, but PRQL often feels more sensible. I feel like the current RDBMSes out there are very powerful, but that there are also aspects about them (and the differences between the ones you’ll use) that absolutely suck. It feels like where back end languages are getting progressively better DX, databases instead gave us… CTEs? Some syntactic sugar for JSON in PostgreSQL? Feels like they move painfully slow.
For what it's worth, that's why I welcome every new tool or attempt at improving things, even if they won't replace the usual enterprise stacks of having some RDBMS, a JDBC/ODB/whatever driver and probably an ORM on the back end.