Sometimes the business requirements really are that ad-hoc that you need something as general as SQL (in which case there's no point reimplementing it yourself as an "inner platform").

There's no inner platform. If the business requirements obligate the schema to change, that has a cascade effect on the remote facade and any ORMs using it or DAOs written against it. The database is part of the product, but if you treat it as a foreign component on its own change schedule, I understand how it looks like an inner platform.

I meant in the sense of http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect . If you try to create a platform that has all the power and flexibility of SQL queries, you end up reimplementing SQL, poorly.