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Imperative: following and executing a cooking recipe

Functional: being multiple line cooks, the food is transformed step by step by different cook, they do the same thing on multiple half-ready dishes.

Declarative: giving your order to the waiter and having the food returned to you fully prepared <-your definition BUT you need to have a restaurant to do this, for other cases, not necessarily (you can line cook at home if you really want...)

SQL: getting elements of the a set and by DOING different kind of transformations (line cooks) and removing some plates (a guy standing there and if he sees a plate, which is a different dish, he tossed it to the trash). The end result is the set of data you want.

Ergo SQL is a functional language.