SQL really sucks. In general I'm not a fan of SQL-like syntax since it makes queries with lots of joins really difficult to read -- it's hard to keep track which value came from where.

GraphQL has some neat ideas and I really love the clarity the nesting provides. But GraphQL is also too limiting: it can't express arbitrary filters, recursion, optional edges (i.e. left joins), etc.

My own take on this is an embeddable GraphQL-like language with all those features and with strong guarantees about execution performance. I've been calling it Trustfall, and you can play around with it (or check out example queries over HN data) in your browser here: https://play.predr.ag/

For example, here's the query "Find the GitHub or Twitter accounts listed in the bios of HN users that comment on HN stories pointing to Open AI's website": https://play.predr.ag/hackernews#?f=1&q=IyBDcm9zcyBBUEkgcXVl...

The repo is here: https://github.com/obi1kenobi/trustfall

It's not just a toy implementation -- it has real-world uses too:

- I gave a conference talk on how to use Trustfall to query any kind(s) of data sources, from APIs to DBs to raw files: https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/how-to-query-almost-everythin...

- cargo-semver-checks, a semver linter for Rust crates, uses Trustfall to define its lint rules: https://github.com/obi1kenobi/cargo-semver-checks