My previous team leader was a pretty poor programmer and would always describe the output of SQL queries he wanted me to generate with lots of "if, then". It w

My previous team leader was a pretty poor programmer and would always describe the output of SQL queries he wanted me to generate with lots of "if, then". It was then my job to translate that into SQL which doesn't really have "if" in the same sense as an imperative language does. Sure I could have pulled out all the data and done the branching in Python, but that would have been a performance hit, but mainly because it would be ugly, require a lot more code and likely be a lot buggier. These days I try to keep as much work done in the database because the declarative nature of SQL generally works out with a lot less bugs as well as the performance benefit. Sure it's not going to be possible for every case, but I have noticed that the more experienced I get, the less I like "if"s.