Technically, reflection is used by Go’s database Scanner interface, but it’s not what most people think of when they complain about reflection.

Good point. I had assumed Rows.Scan() would have just used type switches for efficiency -- it looks like it does for common cases (https://github.com/golang/go/blob/d62866ef793872779c9011161e...) but then falls back to reflect. I wonder why it doesn't just do all of that with type switches? Maybe there are just too many cases and it ends up slower than reflect for the rest of the cases.

Scanner.Scan() is actually just called via a type assertion, though I guess implementations of Scan() might use reflection.

It needs reflect in order to translate struct field names into column names at the very least

sqlc doesn't quite work that way (though "sqlx" and other packages do). sqlc generates code at build time that avoids reflect by using database/sql's Rows.Scan() with pointers to fields (see the link above):

  var i Author
  if err := rows.Scan(&i.ID, &i.Bio, &i.BirthYear); ...

This generated code is exactly what you'd write by hand if you were using database/sql directly.

As earthboundkid points out, database/sql itself may use reflection under the hood to convert the individual fields (though the common cases are done without reflect, using ordinary type switches: https://github.com/golang/go/blob/d62866ef793872779c9011161e...).