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It's not really much of an abstraction. You are still programming SQL, but you spell some things differently.

An abstraction is where you treat the relational data source like something closer to your application; perhaps as a queryable object store. (This is the abstraction that ORMs provide.)

They should look at Linq.

LINQ is nice and if it helps db4o which is GPL has Java and .NET languages support.

it does seem a lot more verbose than it should be.