Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Speaking as a Senior Dev specialized in database access and design... you don't have to use all caps - SQL is actually case agnostic.
But... but my fucking eyes man. I'm old, if your branch doesn't have control keywords in all caps I'm going to take it out back and ol' yeller it.
There are few hills I'll die on but all caps SQL and singular table names are two of them.
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
You should do a project together
You monster.
The commit wars will be long and bloody.
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
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.
Just some key words in uppercase (FROM, JOIN,WHERE,etc) so they pop out
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.
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
The place I work decided to name all tables in all caps. So now every day I have to decide if I want to be consistent or I want to have an easy life.
Fuuuuck. That's why I love postgres... and fuck anyone that requires double quoted identifiers for special casing.
Singular table names? You savage…
It's an English literacy thing - we have several non-native English speakers and using only singular avoids making those folks' lives harder. Besides it's really nice to autopilot that categoryid is a foreign key to the category table. It also simplifies always plural words... I haven't yet written CREATE TABLE pants but if I ever do there's zero chance of me creating a pantid.
Technically, SQL is case-insensitive.
Practically, you want to capitalise the commands anyway.
It gives your code some gravitas. Always remember that when you're writing SQL statements you're speaking Ancient Words of Power.
Does that JavaScript framework that got invented 2 weeks ago by some snot-nosed kid need Words of Power? No. Does the database that has been chugging on for decades upon decades need Words of Power? Yes. Words of Power and all the due respect.
Reminds me a bit of Skyrim. You are... the query-born.
I'm going to print this out and frame it on the wall of my office.
UM ACKSHULLY SQL ISN'T CASE SENSITIVE ☝️🤓
Please tell that to the git overlords at my work. They won't approve a merge with even a single unnecessary capitalization.
The phrase "SQL programmers" is so fucking weird. SQL isn't a programming language. It's a query language. You don't "program" things with SQL. You utilize SQL as a component of programs for data insertion and lookup, but the actual logic of execution is done in a programming language. Unless you're doing Oracle PL/SQL, in which case why are you giving money to Oracle?
Edit: Damn, this comment made people mad.
Your knowledge of data engineering may be limited. SQL is predominant in data processing nowadays. FOSS tools such as DBT allows to write efficient data processing pipelines with SQL and some YAML config without the need for a general purpose coding language.
Why would anyone want that? Because SQL has the interesting property of describing the result you want rather than describing how to compute it. So you can put inside the database, a query engine with decades of optimizations, that will make a much better job at finding the best execution plan than the average developer.
It also means it's easier to train people for data processing nowadays.
Most database engines support stored procedures. You don't need to give money to oracle, you can give it to Microsoft instead.
Or not at all? Postgres? MariaDB? I think I missed the /s. I'm slow hah
T-SQL is turing complete. While the MS SQL server has limitations on OS level operations, if you allow yourself some leeway with CLR wrappers for the win32 API, there's no reason I can think of you wouldn't be able to get the database engine to be a webserver reacting to incoming requests on port 80, or drawing GUIs based off of table state.
It's be slow and terrible, but doable.
This doesn't make sense to me. SPs and functions are in every major database. If I wrote a bash script that runs like a program, and sounds like a program, did I program it? Script it?
And lots of systems have nested logic in the DB, optimization often leads to that to reduce overhead. Unless you're being lazy with an ORM like prisma that can't even join properly.
Getting high performing queries is just as difficult as any other programming language, and should be treated as such. Even Lemmy's huge performance increases to .18ish came from big PG optimizations.
It seems to be about yelling at others that "you're not a real programmer!!!" mixed with being so "technically correct" my eyes can no longer roll the same way they used to.
You don't "program" things with SQL
Why not? It sounds like you haven't written any OLAP queries :)
I've written ETL data pipelines using a system similar to Apache Airflow, where most of the logic is in SQL (either Presto or Apache Spark) with small pieces of Python to glue things together. Queries that are thousands of lines long that take ~30 minutes to run and do all sorts of transformations to the data. They run once per day, overnight. I'd definitely call that programming.
Most database systems support stored procedures, which are just like functions - you give them some input and they give you some output and/or perform some side effects.
As a senior query writer, I use caps for begin and end and some other commands, but all caps makes my head hurt. It's like the sql is screaming at me. I think it's more important to have good looking queries with proper indentation.
Writing SQL on Mac sucks so bad. I hate their caps lock time out
macOS has a caps lock timeout? The fuck...
Timeout was the wrong word. It has to be held for like a quarter second or something like that. It's annoying as hell.
MySQL gives you a half-hearted "Bye" when you exit the console.
My favourite MySQL error is "MySQL server has gone away", like MySQL decides "nah I don't want to run this" and runs off.
(it happens when no data is sent over the connection for a while, like if the query is taking too long to run and times out)
I know a Perl programmer who exclusively writes all SQL in pure lowercase with atypical indentation.
He's also a die-hard InfoWars follower, apparently his go to source, so... maybe there is a connection there.
Wait, you guys aren't just writing code and then hitting the FORMAT button?
THANKS, NOW I DON'T HAVE TO HOLD DOWN THE SHIFT KEY WHEN I TYPE ANYMORE!
Nobody knows (/s) but you don't have to write keywords in upper case (for most DB's default settings anyway).
You can even write them sarcastically like this:
sElEcT * fRoM dUaL
I never use all caps when I write SQL, not sure why people insist on it so much
If you guys think that's cool you should see what I can do with a double negative.
