Eitan Blumin likes an underappreciated data type:
The xml data type in SQL Server exists since about SQL Server 2005, and it introduced a lot of very powerful and useful capabilities that were never before seen in SQL Server. It was the first-ever data type with built-in CLR methods (i.e. where you can write a dot after a column name and execute some kind of method. For example: mycolumn.nodes(…)).
The xml data type and the functionality around it made it relatively easy to “refactor” a resultset from a relational structure into a scalar structure (i.e. a single XML document) using the FOR XML directive, and vice versa (single XML document into a relational structure) using the nodes(), value(), and query() methods.
Show me a thousand posts and I don’t expect to see XML show up as a favorite type more than three or four times. Eitan also shares a least favorite type, and I do expect that one to show up on the most-hated list quite frequently.