> I've yet to see a real-life example of some other query language that gracefully handles queries that would be difficult in SQL.That's exactly it. Nothing has come anywhere close to seeing the same kind of effort as SQL put into it. SQL is the best application of relational calculus (or close approximation, at least) we have – but that doesn't make it good. A concerted effort to build a better application of relational calculus would undoubtedly yield a major improvement for developers, on the order of how something like Rust has improved over C, and as I said before it is unfortunate that we as an industry are not showing interest in a better language like we do with regards to general purpose computing.
SQL gets the job done, but we can do better.
> The only real alternative I can think of is the map-reduce pattern
The alternative is to build a better language, not jump to a completely different and unrelated model. Indeed, there is a place for map-reduce for certain problems, but they are outside of where you would use the relational model.
