Sql isn't more than that. That's the whole beauty of relational programming, you only have to write queries and views, and this simple abstraction does most of the work that you need to do (with pl/sql or t-sql it is turing complete and you don't even need to leave the rdbms).
I don't get why some people keep praising SQL like this. SQL is great for complex queries that contain valuable logic, but it's not expressive at all when you want to do something trivial. Getting all the attributes of user X is so much more work, and harder to maintain, in SQL than it is in any ORM.
"select name, pass, hash, email, realname from user where id = ?"
SQL is not particularly nice for complex queries, either. The underlying model is good, but the particular syntax they chose is verbose, confusing, and non-portable.
'SELECT * FROM user WHERE id = ?'
OR
'SELECT getUser(?)' presuming you have a stored procedure/function getUser that returns the data you need, and you should (or a view, at least)
The former can cause performance problems if you have blobs as well as being an unnecessary security hole, the latter can cause performance problems over large datasets as it often forces the execution plan away from a set based solution.
Relational programming may be beautiful, sure, I guess in some ideal world.
But SQL syntax is a dog. Especially when it's sitting next to real code, wrapped up inside strings and making everything feel dirty.
If you're using an SQL database from within another language primarily just to dump objects and pull them out, and especially if you're doing a lot of it, I have trouble thinking of a situation where you wouldn't prefer to abstract away the SQL bits. Maybe if you're working in a language with built in SQL syntax support? Even then, it's not exactly compact, and you've got quite a bit to do even after you get your results back from the database...
