[kingdomcome50]

You know that's not the point I'm making.

But even for authors that _are_ highly competent at authoring SQL, it is dubious to allow them to compose ad-hoc queries ad-nauseum (let's even pretend these "developers" are _also_ excellent at performance tuning).

This is death-by-a-thousand-cuts. The approach is just too granular. Databases _notoriously_ don't have unlimited throughput, and depending on your particular RDBMS it may be prohibitively expensive to just "throw more hardware" at the problem (I'm looking at you MS SQL Server).

For any system that you can imagine there is a point (i.e. scale) at which the above paradigm becomes a very big problem. Believe me. We are in the process of moving logic _out_ of SQL for this exact reason at my current company!