SQL is neither the fastest nor the most elegant way to talk to databases, but it is the best way we have; here’s why
Today, Structured Query Language is the standard means of manipulating and querying data in relational databases, though with proprietary extensions among the products. The ease and ubiquity of SQL have even led the creators of many “NoSQL†or non-relational data stores, such as Hadoop, to adopt subsets of SQL or come up with their own SQL-like query languages.