Not OP, but I find the syntax to be arcane and bizzarely restrictive. Every query has to be SELECT FROM JOIN WHERE GROUP BY HAVING ORDER BY; for some reason the table comes after its fields and the ORDER BY can't be expressed using field aliases defined at the start of the query.

Instead, I've been toying with the idea of a language where queries are expressed as a pipeline of operations on result sets, like this:

    FROM employee
      /* result set: all employees */
    LEFT JOIN department ON employee.DepartmentID = department.DepartmentID
      /* result set: all employees + their department */
    ORDER BY employee.last
      /* result set: all employees + their department, sorted */
    WHERE department.name IN ('Sales', 'Engineering')
      /* result set: Sales and Engineering employees + their department, sorted */
    FIELDS employee.first, employee.last, department.name
      /* result set: Sales and Engineering employees' first, last, and department names, sorted */

This is a SELECT, but you can for example turn it into an update just by adding a clause to the end:

    UPDATE employee.salary = employee.salary * 1.05

This is a much more regular language; there's nothing enforcing you to write these operations in a certain order, and you can add or remove clauses as necessary. For complex queries, I find that I write in this style anyway, using a chain of WITH clauses as a pipeline with a final SELECT on the end to get the results.