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.
is syntax highlighting not sufficient to recognize the keywords?
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?
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.
That’s just cruel.
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
MAKING SQL QUERIES IN CAPITAL LETTERS MAKES DATABASE TO SENSE URGENCY AND RUN FASTER.
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.
I’m going to print this out and frame it on the wall of my office.
THANKS, NOW I DON’T HAVE TO HOLD DOWN THE SHIFT KEY WHEN I TYPE ANYMORE!
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 stopped doing SQL (the language/syntax) because I use ORMs now. They make the job a bit easier, especially when doing table relations.
Nobody knows (/s) but you don’t have to write keywords in upper case (for most DB’s default settings anyway).
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
If you guys think that’s cool you should see what I can do with a double negative.
COBOL too lol
Theres a dozen of you keeping banking around the world from falling apart lol
I never use all caps when I write SQL, not sure why people insist on it so much
I write it in lowercase but then the auto-formatter we use at work converts it to uppercase when I save the file.
I love auto formatters. Prettier (the initial version for JS) really popularized the concept. If the coding style is automated where possible (things like tabs vs spaces, tab width, line wrap at 80/100/120 characters, where to put line breaks in long statements, etc), it ensures the entire codebase is consistent, and I can jump between different code bases with different coding styles without having to think too much about it.
I always remap my tab key to ctrl. Where is your god now…
Remapping caps lock to Ctrl I can see (and have done), but Tab…? Do you just indent with the space bar
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.
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.
Admittedly, this discussion is more one of semantics than anything. It’s pretty clear I’m arguing that SQL is not a “General Purpose Language,” and that proficiency in that domain is what constitutes programming. Which, yeah, is arguably somewhat arbitrary. But my point is that, colloquially, someone who only works with SQL isn’t a programmer. Data Engineer, sure. DBA. Also, sure. Depends on what you do. Programmer? Not really. Not unless you (as in the person, not “it’s theoretically possible”) can use raw SQL to read in video data from a linux system device file and then encode it to mp4 and just nobody’s told me.
Do that in Javascript. Or HTML. Or CSS. Or by that logic is a web developer not a programmer? What about microcontroller programmers?
I could easily write a full logic program in SQL where the API just feeds it data, which is the inverse of how you treat SQL. Admittedly that’s not as common, but it happens pretty frequently in areas of big data, like medical.
I’ve hired Senior Software Engineers that were DBAs, and others that weren’t. They were a development team, all programmers in their own right.
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.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.
It’s doable. Personal experience
I’m a markdown programmer and i disagree with this statement
LaTeX being called “programming” I can see, but I’ve never heard someone try to justify Markdown as programming. It’s just formalizing things people were already doing to format text in plain text files into approximately half of a standard.
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.
SQL is turing complete
