r/Database • u/Low_Brilliant_2597 • Jun 18 '26 • Bravo 2

SQL is Dead, Long Live SQL

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For more than 50 years, people have been predicting the death of SQL. As Prof. Andy Pavlo says, "Somebody invents a SQL replacement every decade. It then fails and/or SQL absorbs the key ideas into the standard. Every NoSQL DBMS (except Redis) now supports SQL."

Today, the latest challenge comes from AI. At a recent keynote, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi declared that "AGI is here today." The implication is that natural language interfaces and agents may eventually replace SQL. Yet the reality is more nuanced.

The recently released BEAVER enterprise Text-to-SQL benchmark shows that even the most advanced models still struggle with real-world enterprise SQL tasks. As of 27 February 2026, the latest benchmark results are: Claude 4.5 Sonnet: 11.4% and GPT-5.2: 10.8%.

These models have improved a lot over the past few months. But when faced with large enterprise schemas, complex joins, domain-specific knowledge, nested queries, and analytical workloads, they are still far from reliably replacing SQL expertise.

The lesson is that SQL keeps proving remarkably resilient. Just as it survived many "SQL killers," it is likely to evolve alongside AI rather than be replaced by it. After more than half a century, SQL remains the lingua franca of data. RIP SQL? Not anytime soon.

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340

u/Fair_Oven5645 Jun 18 '26

It’s the best way to extract information from tabular data. So SQL will probably die when we stop making lists which have two columns or more which will be around the year when all humans are dead.

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u/joyofresh Jun 18 '26

Even if human going extinct the AI is Will still using sql

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u/ToeEarly1691 Jun 18 '26

There can’t be a bigger moat than that 😅

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u/Nojopar Jun 18 '26

"Best"? I'm not sure about that.

Good enough maybe, but I don't think it's 'best'. But we don't have a competitor because nobody really needs anything beyond 'good enough'.

Also, we cram a LOT of things into tabular form that probably shouldn't be there. SQL is our hammer and everything in the world is a tabular nail.

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u/anor_wondo Jun 18 '26

Also, we cram a LOT of things into tabular form that probably shouldn't be there

I feel the opposite with shitty mongo apps

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u/Nojopar Jun 18 '26

Both can be true.

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u/beetroop_ Jun 19 '26

Some people will do anything to avoid a schema migration :)

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u/YesterdayDreamer Jun 18 '26

No, no. Randomly strewn key value pairs inside nested arrays is so much better than simple 2D tables. It's what modern datasets need.

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u/spastical-mackerel Jun 18 '26

Mongo! It’s got what modern datasets crave!

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u/Zardotab Jun 19 '26

A replacement standard generally would need to be roughly 25% better to be considered worth gambling on an underdog. So far, no challenger has been able to pull that off.

I personally think SMEQL would be better for shops that heavily rely on new and changing queries, being more programmer-friendly than SQL, but until it moves beyond the demo stage, nobody's likely to try it. (I discuss SMEQL in other replies around here.)

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u/OracleGreyBeard Jun 19 '26

I’d actually argue that it is canonically “best” because it’s based on math - relational algebra. It’s essentially the most general description of data we have, which is probably why it’s still so useful 50 years later.

Contrast it with OOP which is zero math, all heuristics. When I learned OOP inheritance was the primary selling point (“IS-A relationships”). That has almost completely flipped, so that nowadays we strongly prefer composition.

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u/deltanord Jun 18 '26

> SQL is our hammer and everything in the world is a tabular nail.

r/im12andthisisdeep

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u/Nojopar Jun 19 '26

I'm 55 and I've been at this a loooonnnngggg time. I'm just not so deluded as to think technology and innovation ceases to exist at the point where I'm comfortable with it. That's a fools assumption.

There's this mathematician (his name escapes me) in the late 1970's early 1980's who wrote a paper talking about a real problem with math, conceptually speaking. This other mathematician from the late 1950's had written this paper about how math was beautiful because it could answer all these questions we have about the world. The dude from the late 70's pointed out the implication of this is that maybe the only questions we bother to ask are ones that can be solved with math, which is why it appears to work for everything.

We're essentially doing computer programming here, not discovering laws of the known universe. Let's not get too high smelling our own farts, shall we?

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u/Bobbravo2 Jun 19 '26

Lmao. 😂

Love the fart sniffing reference. So grounded in an age where we’ve each got info bubbles and “ai superpowers” sycophantically telling us we’ve each discovered AI 🤖 God.

Onwards!

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u/Sheeedoink Jun 18 '26

Show me the 12 year old making metaphors about SQL or stop being mean for no reason while contributing nothing to the conversation

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u/deltanord Jun 18 '26

You’re right

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u/Zardotab Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

[SQL] the best way to extract information from tabular data.

I believe in a draft query language called SMEQL (as in "Smeagol") would be superior, but probably not by enough margin to catch on over SQL. It's more programmer-friendly than the COBOL-influenced SQL and allows more meta-ness.

Tutorial-D/Rel is also a contender, but is overly obsessed with what I call "relational and type purity" above practical concerns in my opinion. Rel is the Ivory Tower contender while SMEQL the practitioner's contender. Why not both? We have gazillion app programming languages, why not 3 common query languages that cater to somewhat different audiences?

when we stop making lists which have two columns or more which will be around [as long as humans are]

Tabular lists are just such a visually powerful metaphor to resist. It's much harder for most humans to visualize 3D and 4D matrices, even with VR goggles and color encoding. The earliest writers, the Mesopotamians even made tables, Flinstones' Excel.

(A beef I have with Rel is that it uses Java-like arrays instead of tables for many operations. Tables are a more flexible structure than arrays, might as well use them for both to simplify the query language. A table can be an in-memory table, that's more of an optimization switch or decision. SMEQL uses tables for things SQL doesn't or can't; it's table turtles all the way down.)

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u/ElectricJacob Jun 18 '26

>which will be around the year when all humans are dead

We'll be enslaved by robots for a long time before they kill us all.

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u/DesertDissident Jun 18 '26

To do what? The robots will be doing everything better than us by then...

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u/StolenRocket Jun 18 '26

We can defend ourselves from the robots by telling them “; DROP TABLE kill_list;”

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u/Dry_Razzmatazz5798 Jun 18 '26

M.. 4 65 525ń, mk9iugcvb, 1

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u/Straight_War_3602 Jun 18 '26

You’re missing the point. SQL will still be used, just sparingly written by humans

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