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.
My ide isn’t limited to color when it comes to highlighting, so being color blind generally shouldn’t be a problem. Set keywords to underlined, bold, italic, whatever works for you.
Your other examples I can see, but at least at my work those are rare edge cases, and I’d rather optimize for the brunt of the work than for those. Of course at other places those might be much more of a concern.
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.
As the other commenter said, the Jetbrains IDEs do this perfectly fine. Although I’d also argue that if you’re working with SQL from within another language already, a DSL wrapper is probably gonna be the better way to go about this.
Unfortunately RustRover is still garbage for actual usage. And I refuse to use an ORM when I can just write the SQL in a more common syntax that everyone understands across every language instead of whatever inefficient library-of-the-week there is. Raw SQL is fine and can be significantly more performant. Don’t be scared.
JetBrains IDEs - IntelliJ, WebStorm, PyCharm, GoLand, etc., all support highlighting SQL embedded in another source file or even inside markup files like YAML. Does your IDE not support this?
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.
Well then use all-caps keywords whenever working on those systems, I don’t care. But an edge case like that shouldn’t dictate the default for everyone else who doesn’t have to work on that, that’s all I’m saying.
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.
