Having occasionally wrangled with relativley complicated queries and jungles of views ans procedures, I have to ask that what would be a better way to get complicated stuff out from databases?

I can think of two other options, which I personally both dislike:

1. Some fancy graphical ETL monster which takes ages to learn and where the learned skills are more or less untransferable to anywhere else. And which, at the end, makes same things as raw SQL but just in a more opaque way.

2. Build the complexity outside database. Yes, you avoid complex SQL, but you also lose quite a lot. SQL prohibits you from doing quite a many different stupid mistakes with your data. At least 99 times out of 100 databases have better performance making the complicated calculations than your home brewed solution outside the database (Yes, I agree. The exceptions can be notable...) Finally, reusability of the results is way easier if you keep as much calculations as possible in the database.

But I can't say that I love hairy SQL, so if there are better ways, I would be keen to have a look.