Actually hardcoding business rules is an extremely bad practice.

So, none of the options is preferrable.

(do I sound like you know who? 😉 )

If you follow the proper DB modelling rules you put the values into a lookup table and then you get to the really preferrable approach:

Select AColumn

from ATable A

where not exists (

select * from LookupTable L

where A.AnotherColumn=L.ExcludedValue)