Optimal Query plans are often a bit of voodoo dependent on the underlying DB. That said, I've certainly seen anti patterns in querying; my favorite being folks

Optimal Query plans are often a bit of voodoo dependent on the underlying DB. That said, I've certainly seen anti patterns in querying; my favorite being folks who bolt an ORM on, don't bother to define mapping properly, and suddenly everything tanks because reasons[0] But also, I've found over time that for DB's that get a lot of 'specific' traffic, frankly it's nice to abuse an ORM's behavior of treating certain things as literals instead of parameterizing them. [0] - Main examples that come to mind are parameter mismatches, either sending unicode for what's non unicode in the DB, or having a default length based on the column size but the column size is unspecified in mapping so it treats it as VARCHAR(MAX). Both of these can break index usage in DBs.