That's one possibility. Another would be for a client to transfer an encoding of a query that can be cheaply decoded, instead of requiring parsing. The translation of a query from an application AST to that encoding could skip the SQL representation altogether!

Of course this sort of approach would give up the (debatable) interoperability capabilities of SQL and I'm not sure parsing is enough of a bottleneck for it to really be worthwhile. A "binary SQL" spec would also be interesting (and maybe exists already?).