It wouldn’t be hard to teach them a graphical representation of SQL, something like Access I guess. Teach them concepts like joins and where clauses, and give them software that abstracts that a bit.

Then add some Excel-like features on top. Everything would end up being SQL at the end of the day, and sysadmins could then tune things to keep them fast (e.g. replicate DBs so poorly optimized queries don’t hurt the whole org, esp. if a dept only needs read access).