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Comment by kcolford | Hacker News Reader

I hate you and and the awful layout you have just introduced me to... Also, that is how I will be formatting all my SQL from now on.

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alt styling

    SELECT 
        a, b, COUNT(*) as count
    FROM
        table
    WHERE
        cond1 AND cond2
    GROUP BY
        a, b
    ORDER BY
        count DESC

That's the one I'm familiar with. The capitalized keywords help give you that Relational Database feel.

Capitalized keywords and section declarations on their own lines helps with quick comprehension for me at least

I've seen this one in the wild and have objections to it.

  - why capitalize KEYWORDS. We're no longer in 1970s. We use colors
  - why waste so much space. Why not just put table on the same line with from. With joins this just bloats up
  - for complicated conditions they have to be put on their own lines. Do I give each AND a separate line and waste ever more space?

My editors and code review tools do not format or highlight sql for me when it's embedded in other files - eg java. I find capitalized keywords to be very convenient. Of course at that point, I can't run sqfluff on it either but this thread has already devolved fairly quickly.

- Half my SQL queries are written inside some other script, like Python or bash, so capitalization is nice.

- Space is not wasted when it it makes code more readable.

- Yes, and also give the columns in select their own lines. So nice to read. Space well spend!

Good points. Maybe there is a difference between a SQL script embedded occasionally somewhere in python, for which this style probably makes sense.

For heavy SQL codebases found in data analytics, there are better styles.

I’ve always formatted my SQL like this, but I don’t remember learning it from anyone else or seeing anyone else do it.

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