I guess it depends, materialising all the steps might be slow and you might need to do a refactor to get a CTE-based query. If you want just want to check a few

I guess it depends, materialising all the steps might be slow and you might need to do a refactor to get a CTE-based query. If you want just want to check a few (maybe changing) records because you expect problems there a final select with an appropriate where is probably faster. Edit: also I don’t like to leave a mess behind and CTE’s don’t require cleaning up afterwards.