I'm coming at this from a somewhat beginners viewpoint so if this is an obvious question it's because I didn't know the right terms to search for. Are there DBMS's that provide an alternative interface (say an API) to the usual query language text prompt, that's less flexible and less powerful for simple operations? Ideally any task that involved user input would be handled with a combination of simple queries via this API and logic in the programming language. SQL or another query language would be reserved for either human users or particular nearly-static queries that did not incorporate user input.

Architecturally the lack of a text stream would probably remove simple network transparency, requiring a local "server" acting as dispatch to the real server on the network.

As I said I'm currently a beginner at any of this, but this seems such an obvious design decision that I suspect it either already exists (maybe everywhere), or it is actually impossible in practice. It would be nice to know why.

Added later:
To clarify the intent is to access the database without using reflection somewhere. Ideally all possible locations of reflection of user input would be ruled out including any use of the system shell. SQL is just the starting point, but under this logic Shellshock is considered the same type of vulnerability as SQL injection.