This is not a joke! I am serious, I like SQL for the following reasons:

• SQL is declarative, which as a side effect means there are now corner cases hidden in if ... then ... else constructs. In practice this means, that once a SQL statement is working for a couple of cases, it is fairly limited.
• SQL is standard. I worked a lot with Oracle, but when I have to use MySQL, MS SQL Server, DB2 or what ever I'll be up to speed soon.
• It is pretty powerful. You can do a lot of things with it. Way more than most people thing.
• Well I think that's about it.

Because on all other accounts I still hate the current state of SQL. And although I am deeply skeptical about all that NoSQL hype lately, I do hope one thing to come out of it: New ideas for a successor of SQL, with a stronger type system, with a powerful scoping a modularization features and a clean design.