Anyone who writes a 200-line SELECT with a recursive CTE understands it completely while writing it — and three weeks later, not a word of it. Inline comments are the safety net against that. The problem: placed badly, they destroy the very readability they are meant to preserve. What this article covers: Prerequisite: The examples run against AdventureWorksDW2017 (table [dbo].[DimEmployee], a … Read more
An SSIS package fails, you open the execution log to find the cause — and face a tree in which the tasks don’t appear in the order they ran, but alphabetically by name. For complex packages that log is simply unreadable. The good news: a well-thought-out naming convention solves the problem completely — without any … Read more
If you can’t tell at a glance where the WHERE clause of a 200-line SELECT statement starts and ends, you have a structure problem — not a content problem. This article shows the layout that keeps long statements navigable. → Part of a series. This is part 2 and covers statement structure (SELECT, WHERE, FROM, JOIN). The basics for identifiers, delimiters, commas, and aliases are … Read more
Anyone who has ever had to debug a badly or completely unformatted SELECT with 30 columns and half a dozen joins knows the feeling: it isn’t the SQL that eats up your day — it’s hunting down what the statement is actually trying to do. SQL formatting isn’t a matter of taste; it’s a maintenance … Read more
A SQL statement that looks neatly indented on one developer’s machine collapses into a staircase on a colleague’s — even though nobody touched the code. The culprit is almost always a difference in editor settings: a different tab width, tabs instead of spaces, a non-monospaced font. Readable SQL code in a team doesn’t start with … Read more
A complex SQL statement is hard enough to read on its own — shifting coding styles in the same file turn every line into an extra re-orientation task. SQL formatting is therefore a team responsibility, not a personal matter of taste. At a glance: Prerequisites: SQL Server 2017+ or Postgres 12+ — SSMS remains the 2018 reference … Read more
Anyone who has ever debugged a 200-line SELECT without indentation knows: SQL formatting is more than a matter of taste. Readable code isn’t just easier to understand — with the right editor tools, it’s also much faster to refactor. In this article: Prerequisite: SSMS serves as the example editor; the principles apply to any editor with … Read more
