Are there others out there like me? I assume I'm in the minority, but I don't understand why. People stopped uppercasing HTML tags, why can't we do the same with SQL?
In most other languages you can read the statements fairly linearly, one statement leads to the next, and to the next, etc. At least within functions/methods and then you usually have indentation to help with understanding boundaries. Each "logical line" may be spread out over one or even several on-screen lines, but it's fairly easy to see the whole logical line and understand it at a glance.
Not always so with SQL.
If I get a complex SQL query to analyze, the first thing I do is not look for the SELECT clause (I'll usually have some sense of that before I start), but rather the FROM clause including it's JOINs and such. When keywords are uppercase, scanning the page for where in the statement to start my reading is much easier. Next I want the WHERE clause and its predicates... and finally I want to see what's being selected. So I'm not reading things nearly as linearly to understand a single logical statement like I would to understand say, a well written function. Also, single queries can be very long, so being able to jump around them where there are not going to necessarily be other cues can be important.
I could be wrong, but the density of user defined names (schemas, tables, columns, etc) also is higher than in other languages, so having the keywords in uppercase makes those more spread-out statement boundaries and fewer numbers of keywords in uppercase again helps me scan the statements for those major parts as I need them.
If you're writing single table queries, no sub-queries, maybe a dozen of columns or so, and only a relatively small number of WHERE clause predicates, then it might not matter much. For better or worse, that's not the world I usually find myself in :-)
But developers with good tooling to deal with more static views of the code aren't the only readers of SQL, and perhaps not the most common.
With my DBA hat on, trying to figure out what's going on reading through logs and such, I don't always have that kind of tooling available. In this context the casing can help as well.... and this may form some of my bias; my first professional experiences on the application side of the world were in very much DBA roles dealing with other people's applications running on my servers. Insofar as access tools preserve developer formatting, having good "color-blind" formats made reading complex queries easier.
I wonder if programming languages should have a way of specifying that a string constant contains embedded code or a template, so text editors can display it accordingly.
I deal with a lot of SQL embedded in code, and prefer uppercase keywords as it seems to help me visually parse the overall file.
To throw out a tossed-off example:
select
P.full_name, A.full_address, AT.type as address_type_name
from
People as P
inner join
Addresses as A on P.address_id=A.id
where
P.deleted is nullPlus, it's more comfortable to type as well.
Just use syntax highlighting, which can make it unambiguous what's a keyword vs func vs name.
But seriously upper case helps my eyes focus on the sql commands so that I have some sort of hand hold on the wall of text.