Are there any alternative query languages?
anonjon: I am surprised this isn't mentioned yet, but Prolog makes a very acceptable query language. Although I think in that version it is called 'Datalog'.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DatalogIt is obviously much different than SQL.
There are actually quite a few implementations of it if you look at that wikipedia page.The queries end up being much more declarative than anything you'd do with SQL. Pretty much you ask the database a question, and it returns an answer (which is awesome).