Comment by convolvatron

that is a pretty difficult place to apply leverage. if you don't support SQL you're at a big competitive disadvantage. because its a weird design with lots of sharp edges that's going to take a lot of your time - customers are going to be unhappy that you don't support the knobs and frills from their existing environment.

so you can certainly float an alternate QL on top of the same base, but its going to be hard to drive uptake. you can translate SQL to your internal variant, but oddities like group by are going to twist your internal model.

at this point I think its more interesting to start to deconstruct these large software systems like OSes and databases and move the composition of systems down a step.