[osalberger]

Datalog isn't especially difficult to learn though, and is intuitive enough that you can fully learn it in 20 minutes.

The relational model with unions of conjunctive queries at its core is excellent. SQL on the other hand feels like some weird COBOL dialect that gives you an incredibly verbose implementation of it.

With that said, there are a few enterprisey NoSQL databases which are relational yet provide a nicer language to work with than SQL. I mentioned datomic (which also has persistence as its key feature), but there's also TypeDB which lets you use the first class support for recursive queries to support inheritance more easily. And of course there's google's Logica language which compiles to SQL and lets you use datalog syntax and the ability to write reusable queries, though it doesn't support recursion due to the nature of its target.