SQL is extremely verbose. During my previous life as a Java programmer I moved a project from raw SQL to the hibernate ORM, and removed 10,000 lines of code in the process. Using straight SQL, the data access code was more than 50% of the entire code base. Switching to an ORM got it below 10%.
It really depends on what you're doing, but I can't imagine why anyone would want to write SQL by hand. If you really want simplicity, don't use a database at all.
It really depends on what you're doing, but I can't imagine why anyone would want to write SQL by hand. If you really want simplicity, don't use a database at all.