Even if you're not doing any joins, the selectivity of your data matters. It's more efficient to perform a table scan than using an index if the selectivity of

Even if you're not doing any joins, the selectivity of your data matters. It's more efficient to perform a table scan than using an index if the selectivity of your filter is low. I wouldn't want to have to manually rewrite a procedural query when my data changes. I feel like this is one of those "X is categorically better than Y" or "X is better than Y because Z" articles. The problem with these types of articles is that they tend to take an extreme position when the reality is much more nuanced. For the subset of relatively simple problems the author has encountered, perhaps the procedural query is easier to reason about, but there are vastly complex SQL queries that wouldn't benefit from an explicit query like this.