This is true. But, I think he means syntactically you can make jumps from one dbms to another without much of a fuss. Obviously there are non-language features but, that is not what is being discussed here.

That's mostly a result of databases (kinda) converging, SQL being a declarative language and it primarily being a wrapper around relational algebra, with a bunch of flags. And of course, it's a very direct interface to the RDBMS, and you're just migrating between systems that try very hard to have the same interface.

As a language however, it's a whole lot of nonsense. Extremely inconsistent syntax, stuffing a trinary logic into a boolean system, a standard that gets extended arbitrarily, and even the tooling ecosystem is a fair bit pathetic (the lack of formatters particularly annoy me; everyone tries to support SQLs generally, and end up missing every extended feature.. if it's not a simple select query/ddl, you're not getting a decent format output)

And it most certainly is a whole lot of fuss to migrate unless your database is tiny, or you didn't actually utilize the DB except as a dumb datastore (eg you relied solely on your ORM + indexes); there's a reason no good translator exists, and those that exist only support a very limited subset of any particular SQL variant, despite programming languages having a whole array of transpilers; it's simply not at all a simple language, and the variants only superficially look the same.

"As a language however, it's a whole lot of nonsense. Extremely inconsistent syntax, stuffing a trinary logic into a boolean system, a standard that gets extended arbitrarily, and even the tooling ecosystem is a fair bit pathetic (the lack of formatters particularly annoy me; everyone tries to support SQLs generally, and end up missing every extended feature.. if it's not a simple select query/ddl, you're not getting a decent format output)"

Would love to see your point in action. For me personally, speaking strictly writing simple scripts, they pretty much translate fairly well. Regarding formatting, are you referring to the output?

Dealing with Unicode in SQL has long been a backwards-compatibility nightmare.

In all fairness, dealing with unicode in general has been a pain point for me.