SQL and the relational model mostly works well and it's probably not practical to redo the enormous amount of work that was invested in SQL and its implementations and extensions.

As someone who frequently used SQL for analytics and less frequently for app development, I would gladly use a language that would transparently translate to SQL while adding some syntactic niceties, like Coffeescript did to JS:

- Join / subquery / CTE shortcuts for common use cases (e. g. for the FK lookups that are mentioned in the article)

- More flexible treatment of whitespace (e. g. allow trailing commas, allow reordering of clauses etc.)

And for the language to be usable, it would probably need: - First class support for some extended SQL syntax commonly used in practice (e.g. Postgres's additions)

- integration with console tools (e.g. psql), common libraries (e.g. pandas, psycopg2) and schema introspection tools

- editor support / syntax highlighting.

It would probably be good to model the syntax of that language on some DSL-friendly general purpose language (like Scala, Kotlin or Ruby).