One size could fit everything. With a good flexible query language and an sufficiently smart compiler, it might be possible. Which means: one size, one winner and SQL isn't flexible enough. SQL will fall down to earth.
I try to write a little database system in Haskell, inspired by Prolog, because it seems very natural and simple to query Prolog.
If you have lots of different relations between data, Prolog is a good choice.
I started with C++ 6 years ago. 3 years ago, my religious view on C++ ended and i finally realized, that C++ is not enough. I saw Java, Lisp, Prolog, C# and others but got stuck in Haskell, because Haskell is the way, i want to write programs.
Independent to a language, i recommend to start without a IDE. C# and Visual Studio is in this case a bad combination.