Ask HN: Are there any alternative query languages?

There's Object Graph Navigation Language (OGNL), and OMG Object Query Language used by most OODB manufacturers. And Db4o uses SODA query language.

Then MongoDB has a form of query language with JSON syntax.

http://www.opensymphony.com/ognl/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Query_Language

http://www.db4o.com

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Advanced+Queries

K programming language for kdb from kx systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_%28programming_language%29

LINQ is a query language for .NET

Look at XPath and XQuery.

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/Datalog

It 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).