I look forward to a future where everything is SQL at this point. It seems we have spent a significant amount of effort avoiding it, but it time and time again is the best way to query your data.

I recently started using Steampipe and it has made my life about 30x better not having to deal with the AWS or Slack API. Essentially a tool to let you query their APIs using SQL, behind the scenes it boots up a Postgres database and essentially does ETL into it.

It doesn't do any updates to resources though, so back to the API again...

https://steampipe.io/

ignoramous

> ...seems we have spent a significant amount of effort avoiding it, but it time and time again is the best way to query your data.

It isn't that SQL is the best way (that these solutions keep gravitating towards it), it is just that SQL is pretty much the industry standard at this point. And supporting it is a predictable and usual ploy to expand userbase further.

More so for the fact that ClickHouse continues to threaten seemingly a critical portion of the business of both Snowflake and Elastic.

dataminded

What query languages have you found that are better than SQL?

[edit] Typo.

sqlcommando

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/kusto/... gets linked here from time to time, along with this similar one https://github.com/prql/prql. I'm not sure either one claims SQL parity at this point but one thing they each have going for them is queries start with the entities, rather than the columns, which makes type-ahead completion more natural.

I think if you were going to do SQL over you would probably do it that way. SQL is definitely not perfect or optimal, just ubiquitous.