[hot_gril]

Conditional concat should be pretty rare. When are you doing that?

[DangitBobby]

When I need a new where clause or a new order by, or I have to stop using an IN filter because you can't use an empty tuple. Stuff like that.

[hot_gril]

Yeah, if you're going to conditionally add filters, this is mostly the only way with SQL. There are a few tricks depending on the dialect, like =ANY() is more convenient than IN, or COALESCE can avoid some dynamic WHEREs.

You're not really missing anything other than query builders, which are worse for other reasons.