I think it's all too easy to forget that SQL is an agreed standard, and a very efficient tool for carrying out the work for which it was designed.

Applications often need to talk with databases; that's a fact of life. If a company decides to switch database vendors, how much application rewriting is required? Or developer retraining? OK, T-SQL is a diferent dialect to PL-SQL, but they're still both based closely on a standard, so movement between dialects is hardly rocket science.

We're always going to have a VHS vs Betamax argument about technical tools, with proponents of various languages/applications/databases/hardware/operating systems and so on justifying their preferences. Undoubtedly, plenty of those justifications are based on sound technical evidence, but they don't automatically make all the alternatives invalid. SQL, and all its related dialects, do their job very well. At that point, whether or not it is strange is irrelevant.