Careful when using equality in T-SQL

Well, it's pretty obvious, but I wanted to post it here, as well. You see, we have this query that was supposed to filter some values based on a parameter. The query was done like this: SELECT * FROM table WHERE value=(CASE WHEN @filter IS NULL THEN value ELSE @filter). Can you spot the problem? Indeed, if value is NULL, then value is NOT equal to value. Not only is this incorrect, but also bad from the standpoint of the SQL execution plan. It is much faster to do SELECT * FROM table WHERE (@filter is NULL OR value=@filter). If, for whatever reason, you need the first syntax, you need to do it like this: SELECT * FROM table WHERE ISNULL(value,@impossibleValueThatIsNotNull)=COALESCE(@filter, value, @impossibleValueThatIsNotNull). Yeah, a bit of a show off, but when the "no filter" value is null, it's better to use ISNULL and COALESCE wherever possible.