Table Value Constructor in T-SQL aka SELECT FROM VALUES

SQL Server 2008 had introduced one interesting feature that helps to create “inline” tables. It’s a table value constructor. It is commonly used when you need to insert few values or few rows of values into the table. Something like this:

But there’s another case where you can use this kind of tables. For example, you need to update few records, you know their IDs and values to be put to table. Here you can write your update like the following code:

In this update command I join table Employee from database with “inline” table T that was constructed in-flight from 4 pairs of values. It’s much easier to write one command, especially if it’s rather complicated, than to repeat it again and again.

Update 2015-12-10
You can even create a temporary table with table value constructor like this.