I think the appeal of sql builder apis is that they make it much harder to shoot yourself in the foot. If your queries are strings you can use placeholder synta

I think the appeal of sql builder apis is that they make it much harder to shoot yourself in the foot. If your queries are strings you can use placeholder syntax to avoid injection but all there is nothing stopping you (or a junior dev) from writing something stupid like "and name ='" + username + "'". If queries are represented with a separate datatype then it is much harder to put unsanitized user input strings inside them.