You seem to be talking about databases who's native language is not SQL. In those cases, yes, SQL is definitely an abstraction. There's some layer that's transf

You seem to be talking about databases who's native language is not SQL. In those cases, yes, SQL is definitely an abstraction. There's some layer that's transforming that into (say) Elastic query or Dynamo queries. I would argue that when talking about writing SQL, most folks are talking about applications who's query planner talks some dialect of SQL. MS SQL Server, MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle, SQLite. In those cases, it's not really an abstraction any more than writing assembly is an abstraction over (say) Intel's CPU microcode is. The query planner takes your SQL and turns it into something else, sure, but you can't generally do that yourself. It's the lowest layer of abstraction that's reasonably available.