SQL is a declarative language so it —- by definition —- hides the execution.
Not really sure what you’re trying to argue here.
Not really sure what you’re trying to argue here.
That’s the point. In an imperative language if you don’t yet understand (or make a typo, or whatever), you can just print/console.log and find out.
I’ve seen junior devs, data analysts, and LLMs spin their wheels trying to figure out why adding a join isn’t producing the output they want. I don’t think they would figure it out using SQL alone if you gave them a month.
But you're not prevented from finding out how your query was executed. For example EXPLAIN (MySQL, Postgres) or query analyser for MSSQL.
Depending on how you write your query and how you structure your data, a query can take 0.005 seconds or 500 seconds.
SQL hiding the execution is an extremely leaky abstraction. To get the performance you need, you have to plan your possible queries in advance together with how to structure the data.
I mean, it doesn't matter if you only have 100 rows per table, but once you're dealing with multiple tables with millions of rows each it's everything.