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I love it when I have to scream at a computer (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by tsuica@lemmy.world to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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[-] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 176 points 10 months ago

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 71 points 10 months ago

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 10 months ago

You should do a project together

[-] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 42 points 10 months ago

You monster.

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.de 30 points 10 months ago

The commit wars will be long and bloody.

[-] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 25 points 10 months ago

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 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months 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 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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 10 months ago

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 10 months ago

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

[-] hikaru755@feddit.de 2 points 10 months ago

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 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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 10 months ago

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 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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

[-] Bonehead@kbin.social 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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 10 months ago

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 10 months 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 10 months ago

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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[-] Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 13 points 10 months ago

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

[-] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 3 points 10 months 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 10 months ago

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

[-] Hupf@feddit.de 1 points 9 months ago

What about Intercal?

[-] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 18 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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 10 months ago

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

[-] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 9 points 10 months 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 10 months ago

Actually not. It's part of the FROM

[-] Stumblinbear@pawb.social 2 points 10 months ago

That double indented from is hurting me

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[-] Steeve@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago

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

[-] idunnololz@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months 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.

[-] erogenouswarzone@lemmy.ml 18 points 10 months ago

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 10 months ago

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

[-] icydefiance@lemm.ee 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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 10 months ago

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 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months 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 10 months ago

That's just cruel.

[-] eek2121@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

Singular table names? You savage…

[-] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 15 points 10 months ago

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 10 months ago

no underscores either? What are we, apes?

[-] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 4 points 10 months 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 10 months ago

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 10 months ago

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

[-] stebo02@sopuli.xyz 5 points 10 months ago

is syntax highlighting not sufficient to recognize the keywords?

[-] Skyrmir@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months 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 10 months ago

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

this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
1719 points (98.8% liked)

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