Id put it in the same category as RDF - largely unusable.
I think data is much wider than 'what can be stored in tables' - that's the whole problem.
Although all data could be stored in tables and accessed via SQL, it shouldn't be. I contend we need to optimize for the common case of tree / graph data and fidn something much better than SQL.
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Have you looked at XQuery? It's far from perfect, but quite useful.
I also find it useful to talk about "data" as anything that's easily modeled in tables, vs "information" (table-friendly data, plus trees and graphs).
Id put it in the same category as RDF - largely unusable.
I think data is much wider than 'what can be stored in tables' - that's the whole problem.
Although all data could be stored in tables and accessed via SQL, it shouldn't be. I contend we need to optimize for the common case of tree / graph data and fidn something much better than SQL.
Is SQL also "unusable"? XQuery is quite a bit more powerful than SQL is.
RDF, on the other hand, isn't a query language. Wouldn't it make more sense to compare XQuery to SPARQL?
Well, Id say SQL is close to unusable.. it has just enough good design to explain its long life. I do respect it.
SQL is a bit like Cobol - served us well for 30 years, time to move on.