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
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.
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.
Um you forgot the semicolon before with assuming there isn’t one in the previous statement. Syntax error. Code review failed
You indent your JOIN? Why on earth? It lives in the same context as the SELECT.
I’ve seen both approaches and I think they’re both quite reasonable. An indented join is my preference since it makes sub queries more logically indented… but our coding standards allow either approach. We’ve even got a few people that like
FROM foo
JOIN bar ON foo.id = bar.fooid
JOIN baz ON bar.id = baz.barid
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
Also some people are color blind.
Also you might need to ssh in somewhere and vi some code or tail a log file where you don’t have color support.
Please tell me what IDE you’re using that’s capable of highlighting SQL syntax that’s embedded inside another language source file
Also please fucking stop with the “it’s current year stop x.” The year is not an argument.
it’s 2023, any dev / data scientist not using a tool that gives you syntax highlighting seriously needs to get with the times
You say that as if AS400 systems with only console access don’t exist anymore.
Partially, yes. I personally use an IDE with excellent syntax highlighting and those have been around for at least two decades. You are, however, often transplanting your SQL between a variety of environments and in some of those syntax highlighting is unavailable (for me at least) - the all caps does help in those rare situations.
More importantly though it helps clearly differentiate between those control keywords (which are universal) and data labels (which are specific to your business domain). If I’m consulting on a complex system that I only partially understand it’s extremely helpful to be able to quickly identify data labels that I’m unfamiliar with to research.
