That has not been my experience. SQL is a fully fledged programming language so there's very little that you can't express this way.
What are you doing that requires dynamically building a query?
What are you doing that requires dynamically building a query?
Well, it has been mine. That trick you suggested works for the simple binary "either include this WHERE clause filter or don't" -- which, agreed, is something that comes up often enough -- but it's only in the simplest of CRUD apps where that's all I've needed.
A quick example: I have a REST endpoint that updates a resource. The JSON fields that map to the DB columns can be missing (leave the column value unchanged), null (set the column value to NULL), or have a value (set the new provided value). The list of assignments in the UPDATE needs to be dynamic; sometimes there might be only one column being updated, sometimes two, three, four five...
* A batch insert query for mysql
* A conditional where clause for postgresql that allows the user to dynamically specify the column + filter operation + values over e.g. a rest end point. Each column can appear zero, one or multiple times with different or even the operations.
* A IN expression with a list of values provided by a rust `Vec<_>` (so dynamically sized) for sqlite.
Oh, but what about <feature>? Well, is that SQL, or a frankensteined version of SQL, aka a "dialect"?
SQL is the JavaScript of databases, and we'll be better for it once we admit this.