Its been a while but yeah NoSQL was the closest.

I remember a good 4-5 years where developers all around me were using couchdb, mongodb, and a host of others. mostly json in <-> json out kind of systems. And VERY hard to maintain after the initial TODO. I remember so much debugging and finding out old records didnt have a way to deal with changes in the "tables" or equivalents. It was maddening.

Dont get me wrong, it did create some really awesome specialty tools but you cant really get around ACID compliance when dealing with databases.

I think SQL has some awesome properties that keep it going:

1. Most major distributions are rock solid stable.
2. Its optimized and fast for data.
3. Its understandable to many types of industries. Software development is only the start.
4. Its integrated with everything already. So ODBCs can just plug and play most of the time.
5. Its the devil we know. ACID, transactions, etc... are all things we know about and are proven to work very well. Definitly when you need to MAKE SURE a thing made its way into the system.

It has though

Window functions were an addition, but more recently struct, json, and array fields with native support. Pipe syntax is getting multiple implementations.

Match recognize is a whole new standard abstraction of window functions.

Union by name is being added (fuck union by position).

sql as the language executed by the db hasn't changed notably, but I do think there's been significant developments in ORMs. for a lot of developmers sql is now just an intermediate target