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.
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
categoryidis a foreign key to thecategorytable. It also simplifies always plural words… I haven’t yet writtenCREATE TABLE pantsbut if I ever do there’s zero chance of me creating apantid.no underscores either? What are we, apes?
THANKS, NOW I DON’T HAVE TO HOLD DOWN THE SHIFT KEY WHEN I TYPE ANYMORE!
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.
Writing SQL on Mac sucks so bad. I hate their caps lock time out
macOS has a caps lock timeout? The fuck…
capslock drains the battery too quickly
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.
SQL is turing complete
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.
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.
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
