With support for Common Table Expressions (CTE), SQL becomes a Turing complete language. To be honest, it makes me somewhat uncomfortable that a query sent to a DB server could be non-terminating and cause a server thread to enter an infinite loop. On the other hand, the practical difference between a query that contains an infinite loop and one that runs for days is probably negligible.

To be honest, I'd like to chip in that it is technically possible to write brainf*ck, an esoteric programming language but nonetheless, its a programming language

https://www.reddit.com/r/SQL/comments/81barp/i_implemented_a...

Btw this runs in sqlite, you can try it yourself if you are interested.

Source: I was thinking of creating a programming language paradigm like sqlite/smalltalk once where resumed execution/criu like possibilities were built in. Let me know if someone knows something like this too. I kinda gave up on the project but I knew that there was this one language which supported this paradigm but it was very complicated to understand and had a lot of other first time paradigm like the code itself / the ast tree is sort of like a database itself but so the tangential goes.

What is your definition of 'programming language'?

Because stored procedures do exist, and there isn't a single production quality RDMS that doesn't go beyond DDL and DML, adding structured programming extensions.

Also, even within the standard itself, it allows for declarative programming.

Also SQL is not turing complete. I see it more as a descriptive language like e.g. html is a language but not a programming language.

Because "programming language" is an adjective or a descriptive term. Whatever looks like a programming language, can be called a programming language.