this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 178 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] Nolegjoe@lemmy.world 70 points 1 year 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

[–] Pechente@feddit.de 131 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You should do a project together

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] DmMacniel@feddit.de 30 points 1 year ago

The commit wars will be long and bloody.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 25 points 1 year 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?

[–] hikaru755@feddit.de 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

[–] Stumblinbear@pawb.social 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

[–] hedgehog@ttrpg.network 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] Stumblinbear@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago

RustRover isn't ready for actual usage, I've tried it

[–] hikaru755@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Stumblinbear@pawb.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] hikaru755@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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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[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Sublime is actually great at that especially when I keep my SQL in heredocs.

[–] Bonehead@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] hikaru755@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Bonehead@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

There are several cases where you'll be limited to console only, or log files, or many many other situations. Good coding practices just makes life easier all around.

[–] jaybone@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] hikaru755@feddit.de 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just some key words in uppercase (FROM, JOIN,WHERE,etc) so they pop out

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

Yea - you want the structure in a recognizable form so that you can quickly confirm code patterns for comprehension.

[–] neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space 10 points 1 year ago

THE DATABASE CAN'T HEAR ME IF I DON'T SCREAM

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[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

[–] NedDasty@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year 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
[–] callcc@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Actually not. It's part of the FROM

[–] Stumblinbear@pawb.social 2 points 1 year ago

That double indented from is hurting me

[–] Cold_Brew_Enema@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Um you forgot the semicolon before with assuming there isn't one in the previous statement. Syntax error. Code review failed

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

There's no way we're running in multi statement mode... I like my prepared queries, thank you very much.

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[–] Steeve@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

I'm at a Data Engineer and I alternative caps lock and non caps lock at random

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[–] erogenouswarzone@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fuuuuck. That's why I love postgres... and fuck anyone that requires double quoted identifiers for special casing.

[–] icydefiance@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Postgres normalizes table and field names to lowercase, unless you put them in quotes. It's also case sensitive.

That means if you use quotes and capital letters when creating the table, then it's impossible to refer to that table without using quotes.

It also means if you rename the table later to be all lowercase, then all your existing code will break.

Still a much better database than MySQL though.

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm quite aware... basically it means that novice devs can create a table in camelCase and query in camelCase... but you can clean it all up as long as they didn't realize you needed double quotes.

[–] icydefiance@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Fair point. I always disliked the design because ORMs pretty much always use quotes, so an entity-first approach can create a lot of tables with capital letters if you're not careful, which is then really annoying if you need to use raw SQL for anything.

[–] cabbagee@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago

That's just cruel.

[–] eek2121@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Singular table names? You savage…

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] eek2121@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

no underscores either? What are we, apes?

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

I tend to use underscores on join tables so table foo_bar would have a fooid and a barid. I have somewhat soured on this approach though since there are a lot of situations where you'll have two m-m relationships between the same two tables with a different meaning... and having a fixed formula for m-m tables can make things ugly.

If I get to design another greenfield database I'll probably prefer using underscores for word boundaries in long table names.

[–] Faresh@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I always thought they should be singular to be closer to the names we give entities and relations in a entity-relation diagram.

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

That too, singular table names just makes a lot of stuff more automatic.

[–] stebo02@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

is syntax highlighting not sufficient to recognize the keywords?

[–] Skyrmir@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Look at you with your color vision being all elitist. Some of us old bastards don't see them pretty rainbows so much any more.

[–] Siethron@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

My work standards are table name all caps keywords all lower case