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[–] 66 points 2 years ago (5 children)

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

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  • [–] 125 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    You should do a project together

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  • [–] 25 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Same, I prefer lower case. Every other language has keywords in lower case, why do you need to shout when writing sql?

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago* (4 children)

    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

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I'm not talking full blown ORM here, not a fan of those either. I'm talking about some light weight wrapper that basically just assembles SQL statements for you, while giving you just a little more type safety and automatic protection against SQL injection, and not sacrificing any performance. I'm coming from the JVM world, where Jooq and Exposed are examples of that kind of thing.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I'm currently using SQLx which you write raw queries in and it validates them against a currently-running db, using the description of the tables to build the typing for the return type instead of relying on the user. It makes it pretty hard to write anything that supports injection

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    You indent your JOIN? Why on earth? It lives in the same context as the SELECT.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago

    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
    
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago*

    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.

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