That's also my reading. And I agree that SQL is a nice DSL yet way behind general programming languages we enjoy today.
I'm dealing with some pretty involved ETL at work these days, and it's really hard and ugly to do it in SQL to "stay in the DB" and keep things fast. It's tempting to read, transform in a high-level language (think pandas) then write back to the DB, but then you give up so much perf.
I would love another API than SQL like what Sparq is doing. You can keep a query optimizer, an engine to execute queries efficiently physically, etc, but it could be controlled with a nice general language API.
Another way to put it is that SQL became the standard and alternative haven't been developed much in comparison. Imagine like the ML world being stuck with Prolog or some DSL. It would be annoying to say the least. Instead people have a variety of APIs and the popular and most developed ones are actually using high-level languages to drive optimized ML engines. These convert function calls and chaining into efficient transformation that use memory, computing units (CPU, GPU, etc) efficiently. The same for DB would be wonderful.
