A few points:

- I can understand why this might appear as hell to many. SQL is unwieldy and doesn't play nice with many tools we use to make life easier.

- I agree with the fundamental premise that a combination of functional and relational principles can be highly effective for data heavy scenarios

- i disagree that pure SQL is the solution to achieve this. If using MS SQL Server, there are great opportunities to leavrage the CLR and F# (with caveats because F# gets less love than C#). You can write functional logic once and use it both outside of the database and inside the database. PostgreSQL has extensions for other languages.