Much of the comments (and the article) criticize SQL as being non-standard and difficult to learn. These critiques have been around as long as SQL has.

However, there is a more insidious problem with SQL: it's all too easy to write SQL statements that have O(N^2) complexity. A simple JOIN can easily result in O(N^2) complexity, yet there aren't easy tools to identify these performance issues. As a result, as a database grows, things that once were executed quickly take forever.

I'd like to see the end of joins, replaced with something that is more explicit about what is happening under the hood.