I am not sure I understand what you want to say but I assume you want to say that what I did was kind of cheating because I wrote code tailored to that problem

I am not sure I understand what you want to say but I assume you want to say that what I did was kind of cheating because I wrote code tailored to that problem and to work on data in a format that makes that problem rather easy? Correct me if I am wrong. But they did exactly the same just that the query planer, optimizer, and compiler generated the code from the SQL query. They still picked a data set, a physical layout of that data set, and a query that would result in maximum throughput. That was not any random SQL query, it was a carefully picked one, chosen because it would be able to take advantage of all possible optimizations.