I think it's a bit more nuanced - while I would say SELECT is declarative, UPDATE or INSERT or DELETE feel pretty imperative to me. Not only are they literally

I think it's a bit more nuanced - while I would say SELECT is declarative, UPDATE or INSERT or DELETE feel pretty imperative to me. Not only are they literally orders, but only DELETE is idempotent. But for analytics systems, you can get close to having declarative, idempotent DDL by doing CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW ... SELECT for derived data. Some systems even allow transactional and this idempotent DROP TABLE IF EXISTS; CREATE TABLE ... AS SELECT. This doesn't in any way help with indexes, with tables that are primary storage and you can't just drop and recreate them and so on, so there definitely is something missing.