Except for niches, one is not going to unseat SQL as the primary de-facto standard relational query language unless the replacement is significantly better, not just slightly. Unless a fad storm kicks in, being slightly better is rarely enough to unseat an established standard.
As far as SQL competitor candidates, my personal favorite is SMEQL. It's more composable and uses tables for many operations instead of dedicated commands and syntax, making it more uniform where a handful of idioms do all the work instead of lots of specialized stuff for each task, like what SQL does.
Thanks. I hadn't heard of SMEQL before. To me it structurally actually looks very similar to PRQL.
PRQL just always has `srt` as an implicit parameter (now referenceable as `this` since 0.9) and a more linear flow whereas with SMEQL I guess you could have more complex chains. Actually you can do those with PRQL as well, you just need to break them out into separate `let` expressions. On the upside, PRQL can do away with a lot of the parentheses and some punctuation which makes it a bit nicer IMHO but YMMV.
I agree with you that PRQL would need to be *significantly* better to justify the time investment in learning it. For some of that is already the case but we'll continue working on it to try and hit that sweetspot for even more people.
As far as SQL competitor candidates, my personal favorite is SMEQL. It's more composable and uses tables for many operations instead of dedicated commands and syntax, making it more uniform where a handful of idioms do all the work instead of lots of specialized stuff for each task, like what SQL does.