I feel like a lot of these concerns are resolved in tools like R's dplyr. You use mostly the same R code, whether your data is a data.frame, or living in a SQL

I feel like a lot of these concerns are resolved in tools like R's dplyr. You use mostly the same R code, whether your data is a data.frame, or living in a SQL source. dplyr generates the SQL query for you. By reading the queries it generates it's quick to pick up how the SQL works! Another big advantage is that you can always pull the data into R and have a ton of general purpose tools available. dplyr is aimed at data analysis though, so may be other use-cases for edge db?