As for the comment about stored data, that's actually the reason why I haven't considered SQL an option at first. The use case doesn't involve any stored data, so SQL intuitively doesn't sound like the right tool for the job.
In the end, I think the cartesian paradigm can be expressed using SQL, but you have to twist your traditional SQL mindset to do that. You have to forget about tables etc.
As for the comment about stored data, that's actually the reason why I haven't considered SQL an option at first. The use case doesn't involve any stored data, so SQL intuitively doesn't sound like the right tool for the job.
In the end, I think the cartesian paradigm can be expressed using SQL, but you have to twist your traditional SQL mindset to do that. You have to forget about tables etc.