[zmmmmm]

It's sort of a weird hybrid monster really, some times it's the worst of both worlds.

You state what you want, yes - but you are forced to articulate it as a specific set of table navigations / logistics through the relational model, as if you were writing the implementation. Then, however, the database then may choose ignore those and do something else to resolve the data you asked for if it wants, if it can prove the outcome is equivalent.

For example I want all the ice creams bought by John. Even though the schema knows the foreign key relationship between "user" and "purchase" I have to tell it back to the database engine in my query. But even after doing that there's no requirement the database will actually implement the steps I was forced so ungraciously to specify. It may "optimise" them away and do something else.