Yes, it would get rid of these things, maybe I overstated the similarity to existing SQL deployments. Non-materialized views wouldn't be part of the schema, bu

Yes, it would get rid of these things, maybe I overstated the similarity to existing SQL deployments. Non-materialized views wouldn't be part of the schema, but you could still have stored procedures which change with migrations. A new index would not be used until clients were updated to use it, just like a new API method wouldn't. For better and worse this is the point – changes and improvements are made in the place you write the query, rather than in a dynamic general query runner. It would probably also increase the places you use an 'application layer' which is tightly coupled to the database and provides a more stable, less general view to various clients. So, the place you write queries can itself be centralized towards what owns the data, but either way there's less happening in between the query and the data.