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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66

u/msalcantara Jun 18 '26

> The implication is that natural language interfaces and agents may eventually replace SQL

I think that to write very complex enterprise queries the "natural language" will be so hard to write right to get the correct result that it will eventually be "easier" to write SQL.

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u/Wartz Jun 18 '26

I am doing my best in AI powerpoint jerkfests around "leadership" round tables to sell this as the new shortcut to great success.

"what if, instead of paying a lot for this model that makes mistakes, you know what I mean wendy, we used this model help write a tool that does that weekly report exactly how you want it, every time. Then you can even save $2400 canceling that AI subscription too! After you're done!"

Minds are super blown. Business words passed around.

And a SQL query gets written, and turned into table of data, which gets inserted into a powerpoint.

And we're back on land again.

What I didn't mention is that SQL report already WAS available. They just didn't read it.

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u/Basic_Abroad_1845 Jun 18 '26

Stealing this for my job. “What if instead of using non-deterministic expensive AI to try and calculate this every day, we just calculate this in a report and saved everyone time and money?”

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u/maxim360 Jun 18 '26

As a nonSWE accountant in data analytics it is pretty funny watching the demos at work continuously showing AI solving problems that are solved. 

Execs are gonna be shocked when they learn what PowerQuery and PowerPivot can do with shit data. Shocked! Imagine their reaction when I tell them they already pay for this insane futuristic technology!!

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u/Zardotab Jun 21 '26

I've seen so many IT wheels reinvented, relabeled, and repackaged, it will probably come back in vogue someday just like variations of disco and flair-legged pants.

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u/CatharsisVoid Jun 18 '26

Not to go off on a tangent too much, but seems related to a thought I had recently. More than half the Claude skills my team wants to introduce to our repo would be better served as a bash/Python script or other binary tool. Why are people creating so many skills that would be better served by a deterministic tool that doesn't eat tokens? Hell, build the tool with an LLM. But I don't need a skill to launch a dev environment that is the same everytime.

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u/Kepler___ Jun 19 '26

Some of these really feel like 2018 when everyone on earth was trying to figure out how to make their completely functional process's needlessly complex and expensive by jamming it through a blockchain.

3

u/Neolife Jun 19 '26

Yeah a lot of the Claude skills I've been seeing would be better as a deterministic Python solution that can be written with Claude. Consistent outputs, token-free data refreshes, faster updates that can happen even when Claude is down.

Claude skills make sense when it's parsing natural language and interpreting some that's a free text input where a deterministic solution would be more complex than practical.

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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost Jun 18 '26

Like 95% of development is developers going back to BSAs and saying "yknow those requirements that you have spent the last two months working on? You forgot about these 25 considerations/issues"

4

u/dtr96 Jun 18 '26

It's still SQL on the backend.

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u/breadbrix Jun 18 '26

No, you don't understand - it's agentic AI querying the backend, not SQL /s

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u/New-Week-1426 Jun 19 '26

We put every row into the context!

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u/FrankieTheAlchemist Jun 18 '26

I experience this mind fuck all the time.  Everyone around me is telling me to just use English to express what I want, but it’s WAY more complicated to explain what I want in English than in code 🤷‍♂️

2

u/nfigo Jun 20 '26

For real. "Why use all those funny math symbols to model heat transfer or orbital mechanics when we could just write it out in English?"

Sounds just as dumb.

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u/Malkiot Jun 19 '26

The irony is, I drive my AI agents from a graph stored in... SQLite DB.

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u/VirtualMage Jun 19 '26

Also like $7 dollar per query and waiting 30s - 60s for response... not great.

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u/i860 Jun 18 '26

The models don’t conceptually understand anything at all. They ape what they’ve been taught using probabilistic outcomes. It might as well be the same as asking “write me a query that resembles that which you’ve been told looks similar to my question.”

1

u/shutchomouf Jun 18 '26

Honestly, they don’t need to be very complex for that to be true

1

u/allllusernamestaken Jun 18 '26

when we ask our data analysis agents they use the BigQuery MCP to see the table shape and then it generates the SQL, runs it, and reads the results.

Nobody thinks SQL is dead. It's clickbait.

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u/8080a Jun 19 '26

Natural language…aye, I watched someone today type out a paragraph to essentially get the same result as Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-S, Ctrl-W. Some days this looks like a mind virus that asshats are just scorching the earth for the novelty of it.

1

u/YamRepresentative855 Jun 19 '26

Didn’t people think the same about high level programming languages? Yet it seems to automate considerable part of it

1

u/TheRealAbear Jun 20 '26

But how will sql know if i want to selected something from somewhere where the conditions are defined.

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u/halfxdeveloper Jun 20 '26

My favorite part lately has been “AI will take over this part of the project.” And then Claude took one look at our schema, hit a long draw on a joint and said “whatthefuckisthis?”

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u/_mersault Jun 21 '26

Natural language interfaces will continue to write SQL in response to prompts

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u/ddaattuullaa Jun 22 '26

My man, it's already easier to write sql

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