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Having had the same argument at work in the past, I feel your pain. Trying to migrate away from massive SQL files and random strings here and there to a collection of interdependent composable SQL builders is apparently a tough sell.

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From experience, this goes from many little piles of hell to sprawling piles of hell. Obviously the current situation isn't good, but the "collection of interdependent composable SQL builders" will turn into an insane system if you roll things on 5 years. Everybody will yolo whatever they want into the collection, things in the collection will almost match a use cases but not quite and you'll get 90% similar components.

Obviously that is just one persons experience. But I'd take a single crazy sql file any day of the year because it's insanity is scoped to that file (hopefully).

But I'd agree the random string are no good. Maybe refactoring them into an enum either in the code or in the DB would be a good step forward.

My experience is this sort of thing is cyclical. You start with one approach, you use it a lot, you start noticing the flaws, oh here's a brand new approach that solves all these flaws... and the cycle repeats.

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