Is there a competing query strategy, technology, or approach to compete with SQL? Yes, it gets the job done but it's always felt kludgy.
I really like what PRQL[0] is doing. Fixes a lot of the unfortunate SQL syntax. My impossible dream is that after years of language stability, Postgres could make it a first party query language.
Maybe as a baby step we could just get legal trailing commas
Or force the big RDBMS to use the same syntax like SQL was intended to be, so I don't have to reach for an ORM or maintain different flavors of the same query.
As an aside, if someone knows a tool that reliably converts PostgreSQL queries to something like SQLite, please share!
sqlglot might be what you are looking for.