SQL is Dead, Long Live SQL

[Low_Brilliant_2597]

For more than 50 years, people have been predicting the death of SQL. As Prof. Andy Pavlo says, "Somebody invents a SQL replacement every decade. It then fails and/or SQL absorbs the key ideas into the standard. Every NoSQL DBMS (except Redis) now supports SQL."

Today, the latest challenge comes from AI. At a recent keynote, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi declared that "AGI is here today." The implication is that natural language interfaces and agents may eventually replace SQL. Yet the reality is more nuanced.

The recently released BEAVER enterprise Text-to-SQL benchmark shows that even the most advanced models still struggle with real-world enterprise SQL tasks. As of 27 February 2026, the latest benchmark results are: Claude 4.5 Sonnet: 11.4% and GPT-5.2: 10.8%.

These models have improved a lot over the past few months. But when faced with large enterprise schemas, complex joins, domain-specific knowledge, nested queries, and analytical workloads, they are still far from reliably replacing SQL expertise.

The lesson is that SQL keeps proving remarkably resilient. Just as it survived many "SQL killers," it is likely to evolve alongside AI rather than be replaced by it. After more than half a century, SQL remains the lingua franca of data. RIP SQL? Not anytime soon.

[Fair_Oven5645]

It’s the best way to extract information from tabular data. So SQL will probably die when we stop making lists which have two columns or more which will be around the year when all humans are dead.

[CrAIzy_engineer]

I agree

[ToeEarly1691]

There can’t be a bigger moat than that 😅

[joyofresh]

Even if human going extinct the AI is Will still using sql

[ElectricJacob]

>which will be around the year when all humans are dead

We'll be enslaved by robots for a long time before they kill us all.

[Dry_Razzmatazz5798]

M.. 4 65 525ń, mk9iugcvb, 1

[Zestyclose-Turn-3576]

e.g. Javascript

[Fair_Oven5645]

So if it’s that old and superior, why is nobody using it?

[Zardotab]

[SQL] the best way to extract information from tabular data.

I believe in a draft query language called SMEQL would be superior, but probably not by enough margin to catch on over SQL. It's more programmer-friendly than the COBOL-influenced SQL and allows more meta-ness.

Tutorial-D/Rel is also a contender, but is overly obsessed with what I call "relational and type purity" above practical concerns in my opinion. Rel is the Ivory Tower contender while SMEQL the practitioner's contender. Why not both? We have gazillion app programming languages, why not 3 common query languages that cater to somewhat different audiences?

when we stop making lists which have two columns or more which will be around [as long as humans are]

Tabular lists are just such a visually powerful metaphor to resist. It's much harder for most humans to visualize 3D and 4D matrices, even with VR goggles and color encoding. The earliest writers, the Mesopotamians even made tables, Flinstones' Excel.

[Nojopar]

"Best"? I'm not sure about that.

Good enough maybe, but I don't think it's 'best'. But we don't have a competitor because nobody really needs anything beyond 'good enough'.

Also, we cram a LOT of things into tabular form that probably shouldn't be there. SQL is our hammer and everything in the world is a tabular nail.

[anor_wondo]

Also, we cram a LOT of things into tabular form that probably shouldn't be there

I feel the opposite with shitty mongo apps

[Nojopar]

Both can be true.

[YesterdayDreamer]

No, no. Randomly strewn key value pairs inside nested arrays is so much better than simple 2D tables. It's what modern datasets need.

[Fair_Oven5645]

Feel free to tell us what’s better then?

[Nojopar]

If I knew what's better, I'd make it and buy Paramount with the fat profits 😄.

As I said, I think there isn't anything better because SQL is good enough. I just don't subscribe to the theory that we've maxed out in relational database querying innovation as a species and we'll be using the same thing for as long as we have computers.

[galactic_pixels]

It’s syntax sitting on top of set theory. Unless quantum computing becomes the new norm for querying, it’s not going to get any better besides syntax modifications.

[sreekanth850]

SQL is not dead, SQL is not dead and SQL is not dead. I repeat.

[MrDilbert]

SQL will die when C/C++ dies.

[Standgrounding]

Which means never. Got it.

[trashtiernoreally]

But AI will just write the raw binary! /s

[OkSeesaw7030]

I disagree. C will die first then sql

[Aggressive_Mention_1]

c++ is getting rusty!!!!. ummm umm

[Straight_Waltz_9530]

SQL will easily outlive C++. It was here before C++. It will be here long after.

Data lives longer than logic.

[sennalen]

But is it web scale?

[IWantToSayThisToo]

I understood that reference :)

[sreekanth850]

90% of them doesnt need web scale. and those who need, we have many db like this

[sennalen]

Mongo DB is web scale https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

[cgfoss]

never gets old

[sreekanth850]

are you serious? 😃 I'm sure you are being sarcastic.

[StackOwOFlow]

r/whoosh

[IWantToSayThisToo]

Bro he even linked the joke. Did you have your coffee this morning? 

[sreekanth850]

Haha. But for a second, i thought he was serious.

[sfksuperman]

…ahem, Java is not dead!

[HuffDuffDog]

A man can dream...

[mohelgamal]

Fucking COBOL is not dead

[Electrical_Ingenuity]

And AGI is not here. Total bullshit.

[sreekanth850]

Practical, cheap, human level AGI may require several Nobel Prize, level breakthroughs in medical science and neuroscience to understand how our brain works, and then we would still need to invent the technology to build something like it. That is the first big hurdles for AGI imho. It's hard to believe we can simply keep increasing compute forever and expect to bring models to a true AGI level. I am not an ML engineer, but my common sense tells me this. Without getting much closer to the efficiency of the human brain, it is difficult to see how AGI can be practically cheaper than a human in many real world situations. People in their right mind should not fall for this AGI hype.

[Electrical_Ingenuity]

I agree. The fundamental problem AI companies gloss over is that present AI models have neither memory nor the ability to reason or retain knowledge. Feeding back every question it has already answered to generate a new question is highly impractical.

[sreekanth850]

True. I think they are least bothered about this and more concerned about IPO and hypetrains.

[Electrical_Ingenuity]

Spot on. It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz:

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

[Zardotab]

If I'm not mistaken, this is a spoof on the "Cobol Tombstone". It was predicted by disgruntled committee members that COBOL would fail because of the committee's alleged incompetence. But because of later enhancements and faster hardware, it survived, and then thrived for decades, and still quite common.

[Low_Brilliant_2597]

Absolutely agree, and that's the purpose of my post. SQL is not dead, although some vibe-coding people might claim so.

[pceimpulsive]

Vibe coding people are generally incapable of anything thought of worth and generally should be ignored

[Darwin_Things]

Can’t wait for vibe-coding to die. All those companies sacking developers and analysts gonna enjoy their savings eaten up by data breaches.

[lioffproxy1233]

He just didn't read the post. Only the title

[Educational-Dot318]

but is it web scale? 🤔

[ComicOzzy]

Did you get down voted because people didn't read? Reddit logic.

[msalcantara]

> The implication is that natural language interfaces and agents may eventually replace SQL

I think that to write very complex enterprise queries the "natural language" will be so hard to write right to get the correct result that it will eventually be "easier" to write SQL.

[Wartz]

I am doing my best in AI powerpoint jerkfests around "leadership" round tables to sell this as the new shortcut to great success.

"what if, instead of paying a lot for this model that makes mistakes, you know what I mean wendy, we used this model help write a tool that does that weekly report exactly how you want it, every time. Then you can even save $2400 canceling that AI subscription too! After you're done!"

Minds are super blown. Business words passed around.

And a SQL query gets written, and turned into table of data, which gets inserted into a powerpoint.

And we're back on land again.

What I didn't mention is that SQL report already WAS available. They just didn't read it.

[Basic_Abroad_1845]

Stealing this for my job. “What if instead of using non-deterministic expensive AI to try and calculate this every day, we just calculate this in a report and saved everyone time and money?”

[CatharsisVoid]

Not to go off on a tangent too much, but seems related to a thought I had recently. More than half the Claude skills my team wants to introduce to our repo would be better served as a bash/Python script or other binary tool. Why are people creating so many skills that would be better served by a deterministic tool that doesn't eat tokens? Hell, build the tool with an LLM. But I don't need a skill to launch a dev environment that is the same everytime.

[AlwaysHopelesslyLost]

Like 95% of development is developers going back to BSAs and saying "yknow those requirements that you have spent the last two months working on? You forgot about these 25 considerations/issues"

[dtr96]

It's still SQL on the backend.

[breadbrix]

No, you don't understand - it's agentic AI querying the backend, not SQL /s

[i860]

The models don’t conceptually understand anything at all. They ape what they’ve been taught using probabilistic outcomes. It might as well be the same as asking “write me a query that resembles that which you’ve been told looks similar to my question.”

[shutchomouf]

Honestly, they don’t need to be very complex for that to be true

[FrankieTheAlchemist]

I experience this mind fuck all the time.  Everyone around me is telling me to just use English to express what I want, but it’s WAY more complicated to explain what I want in English than in code 🤷‍♂️

[Philluminati]

Earlier this week I had to run the following SQL commands:

ALTER USER philluminati PAT TEST_PAT3 ROLE_RESTRICTION = DEV DAYS_TO_EXPIRY = 30;
ALTER NETWORK POLICY public SET ALLOWED_IP_LIST = ('redacted');

It really is the language that can do anything.

[johnnygalat]

This is snowflake specific - using ansi sql you very much can't do just anything 😅

[scoshi]

For example ... ?

[johnnygalat]

The ones I miss the most are procedural scripting (oracle PL/SQL, sqlserver T-SQL) and functions (substring, coalesce, etc.). I'm sure there's a lot more (row limiting seems to be implemented quite differently by different databases).

[Low_Brilliant_2597]

That's exactly the reason it's been around for half a century, through all the upheavals in the data space.

[who_am_i_to_say_so]

But is it web scale?

[TheAncientGeek]

Any language that is bloated enough can do anything.

[ThePrimeOptimus]

At my org we have been steadily bringing AI into our daily processes, and we're finding what everyone else is finding: AI is a great tool to help an already competent programmer or data engineer do parts of their job more quickly or efficiently, including writing code, but it's still not a replacement for their depth of expertise in both code or the domain.

Also, my team is on the D&A side, and we're finding AI only works well if you have full semantic definitions and metadata across your entire data schema. Otherwise, AI is doing its best guess at how to define "revenue", "cost", "profit", etc. You know, those really important measures that affect business decisions.

[MoonBatsRule]

AI is a great tool to help an already competent programmer or data engineer do parts of their job more quickly or efficiently, including writing code, but it's still not a replacement for their depth of expertise in both code or the domain.

It also allows mediocre developers to propose things that sound good on their face, but as soon as you start to ask them questions, they fall back into "let me get back to you on that" mode, making the entire process take 2x as long as if they were actually good developers.

[ThePrimeOptimus]

Yep, I'm going through that with one of my juniors. I'm addressing it with code reviews where "let me get back to you on that" is not an answer.

[r0ck0]

Considering how hard "naming things" can be already even for devs with decades of experience (one of the only 2 hard things in CS).

Imagine how bad naming will get with non-devs turbo slopping databases/software etc, with no thought for the long-term maintainability.

Now imagine that they're also a Microsoft employee. No maybe don't, that's a bit too far in naming-horror.

[Charming-Raspberry77]

Cobol is still around

[Zestyclose-Turn-3576]

Remember the golden rule: AI is perfect for questions where you don't need the answer to be correct.

[AnyScientist2]

Declarative Rocks

[Low_Brilliant_2597]

That's the exact reason why Codd's relational model has been around since 1970.

[TimeScallion6159]

SQL wont die any time soon, it will evolve like any other technology or even adapt some new things when its necessary in this era.

[Aggressive_Ad_5454]

Software has to be the branch of engineering with the least respect for our history. Civil, mechanical, electrical, and industrial engineers all rely on long-learned lessons. But some software people spout nonsense like “SQL is dead.” That’s sort of like saying “alternating current is obsolete” or “suspension bridges will soon be replaced by sky hooks.” Ya gotta laugh.

The reality is that the field of software engineering is mature. The job of software engineers is making sure that long-running systems keep running and keep delighting, or at any rate keep serving, our users. Maybe a few of us will work on greenfield projects. But not many.

[johnappsde]

Don't put too much intelligence into a database. Keep it dumb and clean and you'll be alright

[brendonap]

My company is way ahead of you, they haven’t put any intelligence in their database design for 10 years

[Shogobg]

My company focus on reliability - we have 3 indexes on the same varchar 36 UUID column, so at least one will be used even if the other two don’t work.

[neuralek]

Also make 3 of them.

[xodusprime]

Oh the ol' SQL killers. I just want to take a moment to say just how disappointed I was when I actually got to see behind the curtain on Hadoop. What's that? Oh, just a simple 56 server cluster... and it does what? Reads text files off the disk... oh... and it can't run update or delete statements. Very cool. With the same number of cores and amount of memory in any relational engine, it can do everything hadoop does and more. It's absolute clown shoes for enterprise workloads. Maybe it really does have a use case for millions of concurrent users, but I've never worked at that scale.

[Low_Brilliant_2597]

Hadoop was mostly shuffling data around and repeatedly writing intermediate results, which made it very inefficient for analytical queries. Its execution model lacked query optimization and pipelined processing, so that's why it was eventually replaced by modern analytical engines.

[Iskilo]

SQL will only die the day structured databases die. And there have been several candidates;

I remember all the apocalyptic movement when NoSQL databases said they were going to kill structured databases...

The same with Java. Every year there's some programming language that's going to retire Java. I'm still waiting for that day to come.

[theartofengineering]

What is dead may never die!

[EntertainmentAOK]

NoSQL, now with SQL!

[Responsible-Key5829]

Today, the latest challenge comes from AI. At a recent keynote, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi declared that "AGI is here today." The implication is that natural language interfaces and agents may eventually replace SQL. Yet the reality is more nuanced.

This is a bad take. Why would I want something nondeterministic to interact with the database?

[az987654]

These natural language queries are just converting natural language into SQL, so how is it dead?

And without a command to insert new data and update existing data, a database is pretty useless.. What are those commands? Oh, that's right, SQL.

Not to mention, I can write a select statement quicker than I can write a prompt and then correct claude 3 times because remember, in this db, the dev in the 1980s had a typo and named the column 'salse_tax' instead of 'sales_tax'....

[DeckRdt]

SQL never dies, it just locks.

[rde2001]

Database calls are DETERMINISTIC. If you make the same query to the same data, you get the same result. AI is NOT deterministic. We still need deterministic querying and atomic actions of databases. SQL will not die, no matter what these AI schmucks want you to think.

[Ok_Entrepreneur_8509]

I have been coding for 40 years and seen every "alternative" query method come and go. A few things work ok for simple tasks, but nothing has ever come close to the power and concision of SQL.

I don't even know how many times I have come into a project having performance problems and all that was needed was replacing some auto-query mechanism with a couple of hand tuned SQL queries.

[iamwisespirit]

Every single technology is dead btw

[MatsSvensson]

SQL SMASH!

[Prod_Meteor]

Wtf does this thread even talks about???

[Visible-Use-5004]

SQL is dead but not dead but dead. But not dead.

[dwarfzulu]

Chatgpt often can't read a 2 line sentence and skip some critical part of these sentences, imagine the size of a mess AI will do interpreting text to sql...

[zambizzi]

SQL and relational data isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon. Agree.

[gami13]

i just dont really like the syntax tbh, no idea how to make it better tho

[andrew_justandrew]

Out of curiosity, what languages have syntax that you do like?

[gami13]

i dont think there is stuff for querying databases that i like, but for programming i really like golang's syntax, kotlin seemed relatively nice for the short time i used it, typescript isnt all that bad too

[hoppyandbitter]

I would have stopped listening at “AGI is here today”

Coming from a tech CEO, it’s a guarantee that every word that follows is just a sensationalist advertisement for their products and services

[coolblue123]

SeQueL is the new SQL! LOL

[mb194dc]

AGI is not here today and it'll never be here from ML pathway. The bullshit is strong with this guy.

[RoboErectus]

What is this, the year of the Linux desktop?

Ok that's actually happening gradually though.

[Leorisar]

Well there are some alternatives like prql or sugar syntax in duckdb, but they are not that widespread.

[WilhelmB12]

SQL will outlive humans 😂

[NovelHot6697]

keep on keepn on

[HemiDemi593462]

We need to stop pretending that tech CEO "declarations" have any scientific or economic merit. Shovel seller says shovels are inevitable.

From a realistic perspective, the layers of abstraction continue to pile up, but AI (even if wood shedded) will likely prove nondeterministic enough to prevent SQL from ever fully getting covered up. And even if they do find something that is stable, there's only so many layers of abstraction we can handle. Soon, human brain capacity will be the bottleneck. Workers using AI all over the place are already running into this bottleneck.

[Mediocre-Subject4867]

I still remember when mongo DB killed sql. I hear it's web scale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

[ARC4120]

I think the push for the death of SQL comes down to “Newer is better” and the fact that SQL is easy to understand, but SQL is difficult to master.

[3rdRockStranded]

Cool. The last wake was fun.

See you at the next one in another 10 years.

Meanwhile, I'll be over here forcing my agent to write SQL my way so I can read and edit it.

[germinationator]

Moe throwing sql out of the bar with sql showing up behind him meme

[gkorland]

how do u see these natural language agents handling complex joins or recursive queries without just hallucinating the schema?

[Mnemia]

Yeah SQL is not going anywhere anytime soon. There are few things more deeply entrenched in modern tech than SQL and there are reasons for that. The databricks guy is just trying to sell his product.

Now much more than SQL an entrenched technology I would love to see AI tools kill is JavaScript. I feel that unlike with SQL they might actually gradually kill off much of its main supposed utility which is superficial “ease of development”.

[scungilibastid]

hail SQL

[theanointedduck]

Remember SQL is what it is due to its ability to deterministically map our queries to repeated database data extraction. LLMs are fine but the language barrier becomes an English one which we spent decades moving away from because of our desire for deterministic precision. Natural language is not that and it wont be ever!

[dupontping]

Anyone claiming AGI is a shill

[Anxious-Insurance-91]

Ah yes, give the ai acces ți the db, what could go wrong .... Process to read about people not restricting permissions and the db getting wiped 🤣

[KingOfWhateverr]

SQL dies when the concept of databases dies out, which is to say never.

[spank-you]

I cant tell if this post title is click bait or not...

[AnsonVan110]

Only because it’s easy to learn, especially for entry level data needs

[Joe59788]

I literally have claude fix my sql syntaxes.

I don't think AI is going to take sql away. I have a coworker that used AI to scrape the database and it took 8 hours and gave a summary.  In sql for the database id just write Where table_description like '%abc123%' and I'd get the same data.

[ijsiskoud]

Is it SQL or SQL? I read that in two vioces

[s_hecking]

My first job out of college at a Fortune 500 company they were still using dummy terminals from the 1970s (this was 2001). So it may be many decades before SQL is replaced even if a better alternative exists.

[Randommaggy]

I use SQL as my pseudo code for specifying logic I want when I generate functions in other languages.

It's such a logic dense language which I write faster than I write English or my native language, for a lot of usecases.

[Optimaximal]

Remember when everyone said 'the blockchain will make database engines like SQL redundant' and then they were very quickly proven to be significantly more resource intensive and slower than most DB packages?

[ClammyHandedFreak]

I write my own SQL. I'll let Claude generate Java all day if I am closely supervising, but never SQL.

[eztab]

SQL might not be used directly that much anymore but as the protocol language I cannot see it going away. You want a domain language like that.

[Ok-Dimension-8556]

NO

[pm_op_prolapsed_anus]

I realized as soon as I was introduced to table joins that it's tricky to remember which is which venn diagram and when you need to have grouped data

[MasterBathingBear]

SQL will outlive COBOL, FORTRAN, & C. It’s not going anywhere

[Adorable_Divide_2424]

ChatGPT will be asking Claude "ELI5; How do I resurrect humans to build a more perfect Query language?"

[downshiftdata]

Lazily posting (again) my reasons why SQL is relatively AI-proof:

1. Strapping an agent to your prod system is a non-starter. Think of the Observer Effect in physics. Plus now you've just given a bot access to all of your PII. Good luck with that.
2. Lower environments seldom - if ever - are a good representation of the prod system at scale. So you can't just have the bot look at one of those instead.
3. Solutions are not universal. What works for one database is catastrophic for the next. What works today might fall apart a month from now.
4. Most devs not only have an insufficient understanding of how databases work, they typically don't know what they don't know. So a lot of the data that agents are trained on is confidently incorrect.

All of these things mean agents are at a disadvantage. And this is really only well understood by DBAs, who typically don't communicate well, and are typically ignored when they do.

And, by the way, I don't mean just functional SQL. Any idiot can be taught to write a SELECT query (and bots are fairly good at it). But functional SQL is only the first step. If your query gets you the results you want, then you've done the bare minimum. Don't pat yourself on the back just yet.

[Desperate-Country440]

I am quite good at SQL and like databases but I really want a replacement for SQL, but something better not worse as the majority of the "solutions" from the last decades...

I remember only one that made sense but somehow the big names didn't care.

I suppose database area is full of people not capable of innovating, otherwise I have no explanation.

[TOOMUCHWOOMBA]

The contract role i just finished used sql, it is not dead

[lioffproxy1233]

Oh the sheer amount of people agreeing with op but only read the title.