In what was supposed to be its greatest strength a long, long time ago. I don't know that anyone considers SQL to be anything other than a technical detail any more; certainly not to the extent of expecting normals to be able to get what they need out of a database by writing raw queries.
Yes, but that feature still hinders SQL today. If "usability by normals" was dropped as a design requirement, SQL would look a lot more like a normal programming language, and suck a lot less.
