For me, it’s CTE’s. I find it amazing to complete a calculation with clear intermediate steps, and goes a long way towards convincing people to use SQL rather than Excel to perform calculations on large tables of data.
What construct do you like using on a daily basis?
You can create a functional enum view by just assigning enums as the column names and storing a single row of the int (or whatever enum) representation.
Then use that view in a cross join. You can (almost) eliminate magic numbers entirely and makes the code much more human legible.
Hey, that’s pretty neat. Perhaps you could wrap a the OrderType view in a CTE and join on that to get the values back?