And there's me, who prefers writing SQL files in full lowercase. Keywords and syntax are highlighted and colored in every tool today, and every SQL engine I worked with had absolutely no problem with lowercase files.
Honestly same, one of my coworkers thinks I'm insane for doing it that way, but he also likes to put commas in from of the column names and have everything lowercase. At least we know who the actual psycho is
I’m a shift person I feel like pressing caps lock too often breaks my flow. I’m used to using my little finger a lot from playing piano though tbf pressing shift is nothing
I've been writing SQL for 15 years. Eventually you get bored of all lowercase or all uppercase AND START writing your QUERIES LIKE this. Just a psychotic mishmash of muscle memory, laziness, and autocomplete all fighting each other within the same statement.
Lowercase on first draft (it will fail to run anyways). Uppercase if I ever end up showing the query to someone (hopefully it doesn't fail when they run it)
I started writing sql 13 years ago. I started writing like this from the beginning because that was the way I saw the queries written on the tutorials, took me like a year to notice it was case independent
I prefer a strongly-structured syntax so it is easier to read in the future, which is most important anyway. So going through the trouble of capitalizing what should be, as I go, is worth it. I also always use back ticks around table names, since it makes it easier to search by table name inside mixed codebases.
Yup. People don’t realize that putting the reserved words in upper case eases the cognitive load on the brain when reading the scripts for comprehension.
Same goes for new lines and tabs.
Using all three techniques renders SQL very easy to read, comprehend, update, and debug.
Yeah I get embarrassed passing ugly queries to other people. When I first began I just wrote everything lowercase until a coworker said “you live like this?” when sharing something in Snowflake. I still get embarrassed thinking about that lol. (He was a good friend though)
If someone reads my SQL and hates me for the indention and casing rather than whatever other weird shit I discovered you could do with it, I'm considering that a solid win.
How will a theoretical new developer in the future ever be able to distinguish between key words and database objects at first glance if strict formatting guidelines aren't religiously followed?
The biggest monster I ever worked with would have these queries with absolutely 0 formatting and would only carriage return when he hit the end of his monitor. He'd have subquery inside subquery like it was a nested function and vlookup.
He wrote hot trash queries. One day when he went into a meeting and left his computer unlocked I barely scrolled in on his query window in SSMS so every query was cut off so he'd have to scroll right/left to read it all and he was too dumb to know he was zoomed in or that shift scroll wheel was to scroll horizontal.
He started rewriting procedures and commiting them to production to match his new zoom level. I had a database trigger stopping people from updating procedures unless the database was in a certain mode to prevent people with way too much access to change procedures.
He lost his damn mind over the database trigger I added. I don't think he ever figured out about the zoom. One day I set it back to what it was originally and he gave up rewriting them back to their original format. He exploded at me and didn't come back for like 2 weeks
That was the first of two people who got violent at the workplace at that job with me.
Same, I don't understand why anyone would choose to do upper case. I am of course a believer in "you do whatever the code base currently does", but if it's a brand new project, the standard is lower-case for me. It's not 1990 anymore, our code editors display the keywords colorized.
Because SQL predates the ubiquity of syntax highlighting. This usage of caps (also seen in e.g. COBOL) gives some visual hints about syntax even on monochrome.
Guilty of the same. My caps lock is remapped to Esc... Muscle memory runs deep at this point, I've considered mapping LShift+RShift to caps lock but that's diminishing returns and I still end up holding down shift if I don't catch myself. Autocomplete helps though
<Khassaki> HI EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!! <Judge-Mental> try pressing the the Caps Lock key <Khassaki> O THANKS!!! ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO WRITE NOW!!!!!!! <Judge-Mental> fuck me
I stopped doing this when I started using right shift for the left-side captials. Game changer for your pinky. Aaaand you just go back to caps lock for the sake of efficiency lol
You're the second comment to say this. Why would you do that? Granted, I use a 58 key split keyboard that doesn't even have a caps lock key (technically I have it set to upper layer + Lshift, but I never use it) but why esc? You have a perfectly good one right there in the corner.
when I did my comp sci degree, my teacher wouldn't use capslock, he'd use shift. and if he got distracted while typing an SQL query, he'd keep holding it down.
after 10 seconds or whatever, stickykeys would turn on, and the locked down computers we had in all the classrooms wouldn't let you turn it back off. So he had to reboot.
This happened multiple times per class period some days
Non programmer here but have to use mysql at work. Why are the command in caps? Any particular reason for this? I feel im angrily ordering my computer to do something. I kinda feel like im threatening the pc with a beating if it does not SELECT a certain colum FROM a database.
Pre llm it was true . And it’s proving true now too . When your team has a guy that can write complex SPs . Even better a guy that can understand someone else’s 2k lines of SP and modify it successfully . That guy was a god . No team would let go of that asset .
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u/EncryptedPlays Jul 21 '26
then there's goofy lil me who holds shift the entire time