A lot of times you don't need to change the SQL string at all. You just bind different parameter values before sending the same SQL string to the DB server over

A lot of times you don't need to change the SQL string at all. You just bind different parameter values before sending the same SQL string to the DB server over and over again. The exceptions are SQL elements that cannot be (easily, or at all) parametrized, such as the column lists in SELECT, ORDER BY, GROUP BY, or changing the WHERE "shape" and so on. In my experience, this tends to be a minority of queries, although an important minority. ---- P.S. If string concatenations are your bottleneck, then your database is screaming fast! The real-life bottlenecks are usually in excessive database round-trips and unoptimized query plans, and are orders-of-magnitude larger.