1. Because you referred to lines of code as the way to suggest SQL is obvious better, not performance

2. No, my point was that talking about code clarity was a distraction because to talk about lines of code as a determinant of performance is clearly wrong.

3. Tangentially, yes, if some behavior takes 100 lines of general purpose code to express, I would rather read it in the general purpose language than in SQL even if the SQL was fewer lines. It's hard to imagine why this would ever be the case though.