[refset]

The actual ISO standard falls well short of being useful/sufficient to anyone who isn't an incumbent player. It's effectively a moat and therefore a direct impediment to competition from teams who have novel technical ideas but don't have access to significant capital - building a SQL implementation is a long, expensive journey. This is why many startups resort to building Postgres extensions, or using Calcite or DataFusion.

If SQL weren't so (needlessly) complex we would see much more competition across the database space.

[mattashii]

> If SQL weren't so (needlessly) complex we would see much more competition across the database space.

I think there is more competition across the database space now than back when the SQL spec was less complex (say, in 1989 with SQL-89).

Also, much complexity in the spec comes from complex features; I really like grouping sets and window functions, and sure, that adds complexity; but it does allow users to express certain concepts that allow the database to more efficiently process data than sending everything to the user and letting the user solve the computations.