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As I read somewhere once, you don't tell SQL how to do it, you tell SQL what you want, and that's a great way of thinking about it. A procedural programmer gets bogged down with the details, and has to concentrate on breaking things down into small pieces, explicitly reading and processing one row of data at a time, and figuring out how to combine those results together at the end to make it all work. A set-based SQL programmer worries about none of those things: In the set-based world, you state your relations and join the tables together, add some grouping and criteria, and it is the database engine that worries about the specifics.