Overview Documentation should be an inherent part of any database development project. Virtually everybody would agree with this. However, documentation is usually the first goal to be a victim of project pressure. “If you want to know what the code does, have a look at the code.” This is a very common view on missing … 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
Dieser Artikel in Deutsch… Overview Most editors of well-known development environments including SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) use monospaced fonts. With that, each character occupies the same amount of horizontal space. Texts can be easily indented and aligned when using monospaced fonts. An efficient feature for aligning and indenting text elements is the Tab-key. By … Read more
Dieser Artikel in Deutsch… Overview Recently, I had to revise a Stored Procedure with nearly 2.000 lines of code. The procedure was edited by three developers, one after another. It contained sub statements for about 30 tables with varying degrees of complexity. But essentially all Sub-Statements were designed to fulfill a similar task. While all … 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
