What are good alternatives to SQL (the language)? [closed]

Question

I occasionally hear things about how SQL sucks and it's not a good language, but I never really hear much about alternatives to it. So, are other good languages that serve the same purpose (database access) and what makes them better than SQL? Are there any good databases that use this alternative language?

EDIT: I'm familiar with SQL and use it all the time. I don't have a problem with it, I'm just interested in any alternatives that might exist, and why people like them better.

I'm also not looking for alternative kinds of databases (the NoSQL movement), just different ways of accessing databases.

Answer 1

I certainly agree that SQL's syntax is difficult to work with, both from the standpoint of automatically generating it, and from the standpoint of parsing it, and it's not the style of language we would write today if we were designing SQL for the demands we place on it today. I don't think we'd find so many varied keywords if we designed the language today, I suspect join syntax would be different, functions like GROUP_CONCAT would have more regular syntax rather than sticking more keywords in the middle of the parentheses to control its behavior... create your own laundry list of inconsistencies and redundancies in SQL that you'd like/expect to see smoothed out if we redesigned the language today.

There aren't any alternatives to SQL for speaking to relational databases (i.e. SQL as a protocol), but there are many alternatives to writing SQL in your applications. These alternatives have been implemented in the form of frontends for working with relational databases. Some examples of a frontend include:

• SchemeQL and CLSQL, which are probably the most flexible, owing to their Lisp heritage, but they also look like a lot more like SQL than other frontends.
• LINQ (in .Net)
• ScalaQL and ScalaQuery (in Scala)
• SqlStatement, ActiveRecord and many others in Ruby,
• HaskellDB
• ...the list goes on for many other languages.

I think that the underlying theme today is that rather than replace SQL with one new query language, we are instead creating language-specific frontends to hide the SQL in our regular every-day programming languages, and treating SQL as the protocol for talking to relational databases.

Answer 2

Take a look at this list.

Hibernate Query Language is probably the most common. The advantage of Hibernate is that objects map very easily (nearly automatically) to the relational database, and the developer doesn't have to spend much time doing database design. Check out the Hibernate website for more info. I'm sure others will chime in with other interesting query languages...

Of course, there's plenty of NoSQL stuff out there, but you specifically mention that you're not interested in those.