I'm not surprised. A big advantage of PHP's database layer is that it doesn't reinvent the SQL wheel.
[set Greenspun Cynicism Level to MEDIUM HOT]
Other platforms wrap up SQL to the extent that you are encouraged to pretend it does not exist. This is an irreplaceable killer feature if you are trying to encourage new programmers to design things that will eventually prove difficult for them to optimize, or are trying to drum up membership in the NoSQL-silver-bullet-of-the-month club, but in the end what was good for 1996 is still pretty good for 2012: Pull the data from the database using classic SQL from the 1970s, loop through the result set, paste each row into the template, and ship it out to Apache.
PHP does this transparently, which makes it relatively easy to figure out what is going on. Of course, what is going on may be "the novice PHP programmer is staring directly at the SQL but still cannot optimize it", but hey, at least now you can see the problem.
