Speaking as a Senior Dev specialized in database access and design… you don’t have to use all caps - SQL is actually case agnostic.
But… but my fucking eyes man. I’m old, if your branch doesn’t have control keywords in all caps I’m going to take it out back and ol’ yeller it.
There are few hills I’ll die on but all caps SQL and singular table names are two of them.
I’m a sql developer, and I am completely the opposite to you. I will find it incredibly difficult to read when everything is in caps
Same, I prefer lower case. Every other language has keywords in lower case, why do you need to shout when writing sql?
I understand it as an attempt to get very basic, manual syntax highlighting. If all you have is white text on black background, then I do see the value of making keywords easy to spot by putting them in all caps. And this probably made sense back when SQL was first developed, but it’s 2023, any dev / data scientist not using a tool that gives you syntax highlighting seriously needs to get with the times
Sorry, to clarify, not everything is in all caps. I’ll append my prefered syntax below
WITH foo AS (
SELECT id, baz.binid
FROM
bar
JOIN baz
ON bar.id = baz.barid
)
SELECT bin.name, bin.id AS binid
FROM
foo
JOIN bin
foo.binid = bin.id
The above is some dirt simple SQL, when you get into report construction things get very complicated and it pays off to make sure the simple stuff is expressive.
You indent your JOIN? Why on earth? It lives in the same context as the SELECT.
Um you forgot the semicolon before with assuming there isn’t one in the previous statement. Syntax error. Code review failed
I believe this has been proven. It’s because capital letters all have the same shape whereas lower case letters do not. So your brain can take shortcuts to reading lower case but cannot with upper case.
Also most if not all editors will highlight SQL keywords so it’s probably not too hard to discern SQL commands and everything else in modern day.
The place I work decided to name all tables in all caps. So now every day I have to decide if I want to be consistent or I want to have an easy life.
Fuuuuck. That’s why I love postgres… and fuck anyone that requires double quoted identifiers for special casing.
Postgres normalizes table and field names to lowercase, unless you put them in quotes. It’s also case sensitive.
That means if you use quotes and capital letters when creating the table, then it’s impossible to refer to that table without using quotes.
It also means if you rename the table later to be all lowercase, then all your existing code will break.
Still a much better database than MySQL though.
It’s an English literacy thing - we have several non-native English speakers and using only singular avoids making those folks’ lives harder. Besides it’s really nice to autopilot that categoryid is a foreign key to the category table. It also simplifies always plural words… I haven’t yet written CREATE TABLE pants but if I ever do there’s zero chance of me creating a pantid.
I always thought they should be singular to be closer to the names we give entities and relations in a entity-relation diagram.
