Naked WHERE Clause

In a conversation today, my coworker mentioned a ‘naked WHERE clause’. I’d never heard of the term. I posted a question on StackOverflow and an answer was posted shortly thereafter.

A naked WHERE clause would refer to something that always returns true.

WHERE 1 = 1

This is commonly used on something like a search form where the user can enter one or many values and rather than checking a counter to see if you need to add a WHERE clause you add a generic WHERE clause and build everything up in an AND clause. You can run into issues if you aren’t checking to make sure there is at least on AND clause added.

My first reaction was, why would someone do this and what is the big deal.

Then it hit me. A naked where clause is the same as a select without a where clause.