We've been writing SQL queries with WHERE, GROUP BY, ORDER BY, HAVING for decades. But nobody is using DOS 3.2 or Windows 1.0 anymore - why limit yourself to SQL:86? The latest versions of MariaDB support the features of SQL:99 (common table expressions), SQL:2003 (window functions), SQL:2011 (system-versioned tables), and SQL:2016 (JSON), which allows you to build more complex (for example, hierarchical) models data and write simpler and faster queries.