Probably the sweet spot is declarative with an imperative escape hatch. The vast majority of time, you just want your SQL query to give you back the right rows

Probably the sweet spot is declarative with an imperative escape hatch. The vast majority of time, you just want your SQL query to give you back the right rows and don't care how the DB engine manages it. In the rare case where it takes too long, then you want to be able to dig into the query plan, change the indexes, maybe even deploy a custom function written in a different language in extreme cases.