I should probably start out by pointing out that the title of this post is a lie. By definition, RESTful protocols can not be truly SQL-like because they depend on Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs aka URLs) for identifying resources. URIs on the Web are really just URLs and URLs are really just hierarchical paths to a particular resource similar to the paths on your local file system (e.g. /users/mark/bobapples, A:\Temp\car.jpeg). Fundamentally URIs identify a single resource or aset of resources. On the other hand, SQL is primarily about dealing with relational data which meansyou write queries that span multiple tables (i.e. resources). A syntax for addressing single resources (i.e. URLs/URIs) is fundamentally incompatible with a query language that operates over multiple resources. This was one ofthe primary reasons the W3C created XQuery even though we already had XPath.

someone is trying to sell a thick client model here. NEED TO MAINTAIN CLIENT REVENUES