How it started

I have to mention here the name of Edgar Codd and his work on relational data model - you can read the original paper dated 1970 here. Following his work, with some turbulences, SEQUEL was born - in 1974, and later as SQL/DS, IBM released the first commercial relational database management system.
Compared to Python (1991) or JavaScript (1995), it is relatively old or mature, as I should say. I won't dive into the details of various implementations and standards, as it's a broad topic to cover, maybe in another post.

How it's performing?

I won't be fully objective - that's for sure, on a daily basis I use SQL a lot. To some extent, I really hope that the demand for SQL won't disappear anytime soon.
But let's look at some more objective sources.
Starting with Google Trends, we can clearly see that over the last ~18 years the trend is clear, and it's not positive. But it's just the trend and does not give us a clue on how it compares to other technologies.



And as always in such cases, StackOverflow comes to the rescue. Let's look at the StackOverflow survey results (2016 and 2022 Starting some time ago, in 2013 we can see that SQL was actually the most popular technology! Over the years this varied, going from "popularity score" of ~60% in 2013 to ~49% in the most recent survey from 2022. A decline, for sure, but it is holding strong.

Why is that? Being the primary technology for data-related tasks for such a long time, it became difficult to replace. SQL has a lot of advantages but also causes a lot of pain, some of these pain points were targeted by NoSQL technologies over the last decade (but don't take me wrong, NoSQL is not something invented recently). Also, it is relatively easy to learn, relational databases with all their characteristics (despite many faults) are needed, and SQL is almost always used as the main query language.

So - is it dying?

No, not now and not anytime soon. The scale on which databases (those using SQL) are in use, the number of people who know and use SQL, the lack of one-to-rule-them-all alternative technology - all these are arguments confirming that SQL won't just disappear.

stay curious.