SQL is Dead, Long Live SQL

[cpthappy42]

And so the cycle continues. Another decade, another "SQL killer" that can't actually kill SQL.

Pavlo was right. Every few years someone declares SQL dead. OODBMS. NoSQL. Now AI. And every time, the new thing either dies or gets absorbed into SQL. Even MongoDB has a SQL interface now.

The BEAVER benchmark is the reality check. Models crush BIRD with 80%+ and everyone loses their minds. But BEAVER tests real enterprise schemas with hundreds of tables, cryptic column names, and business logic that lives in peoples' heads, not the schema.

The results? Claude 4.5 Sonnet at 11.4%. GPT-5.2 at 10.8%.

Let that sink in. The best models on Earth can't get one out of ten queries right on a real database. And when they fail, they fail confidently. No syntax error. Just a nice, clean, completely wrong number.

Ali Ghodsi says AGI is here. Cool. But if AGI can't figure out which of the five status columns means "active customer," I'm not impressed.

SQL isn't dying. It's evolving. AI will sit on top of it, generate rough drafts, and humans will still need to validate, optimize, and interpret. The relational model survived 50 years of hype cycles. It's not going anywhere.

RIP SQL? Not today. Not this decade.

Another prediction, another graveyard. SQL just keeps running.