There's a generic reporting application I wrote. Users can use specific values to fine tune any of an arbitrary number of fields. Fields left empty typically imply that all data in that field is to be accepted.
So, whilst I wrote code to allow these reports the DBA that uses the values in his stored procedures handles these wild-card statement in a case statement (or rather, a series of them), usually in the WHERE clause.
Something like (pretend it's an int field)
WHERE intCol = CASE @ival
WHEN -1 THEN intCol
else @ival
END
The point being that the match everything is accomplished by comparing a column's value to itself. He knows all sorts of performance stuff, so I'd imagine he'd not use this if it were bad practice.
These can also turn up in the SELECT list
See:
CASE (Transact-SQL)[
^]
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