> I think the GP is saying it's low level in the frame of reference of the data and relationships, which is true because you have to explicitly join everything

> I think the GP is saying it's low level in the frame of reference of the data and relationships, which is true because you have to explicitly join everything together 'by hand' even though you could imagine abstractions that could be built on top, making this unnecessary. Data abstractions in SQL are accomplished with views: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createview.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createview.html Model your most common joins once into a view, then use the view instead of repeating the joins everywhere.