I know SQL moderately well, but does anyone share my view that moving AWAY from using SQL syntax is a GOOD thing? I personally really dislike writing SQL, i'm sure lots of other people do too, thats why people write query builders etc.
Actually i find SQL a great thing, and one thing that bothers me with all those "other" databases is that you have to start from scratch with everyone of them. A common Query language would be awesome!
You might be interested in a project I've been working on lately: http://htsql.org/ -- it's a high-level query language that compiles into SQL. The syntax was motivated by URLs and XPath; the semantics is based on navigational model. As opposed to many other non-SQL query languages, it supports analytical queries including aggregates and projections.
I'm now a user of both MongoDB and SQL-based ORMs, and I find that using a No-SQL type syntax makes it much easier to work with data programatically, ie, turn a UI query into a db query.
But as a human, say when I'm using the Mongo client, I miss using the much readable SQL. Typing JSON queries can be quite painful. And driving it thru a map-reduce javascript function just to summarize a column is horrendous.
