For sure you can offer a good approximation through SQL but I'm unlucky enough that I've needed to support dynamic sorting and query builders against tables at

For sure you can offer a good approximation through SQL but I'm unlucky enough that I've needed to support dynamic sorting and query builders against tables at least 4 times for different datasets in the past years. I'm particularly proud of the last one I built that still absolutely flies despite doing wildcard querying on text fields (no full text index) with multiple combined queries and a dynamically computed status from aggregate child properties in MySQL 5 with its lack of window functions. The solution was basically dynamically construct an efficient as possible inner query before applying the joins. To clarify I believe in doing as much as possible in raw SQL and have a fondness for the stored procedure driven system I worked with but this problem remains unsolvable in SQL alone and I just keep encountering it.