Three ways to model the same ETL task in SSIS. One takes 10 minutes and is straightforward. One takes hours, 40 Data Flow Tasks, and won’t survive the next requirements change. The question “how much SQL belongs in an SSIS package?” decides maintainability, readability, and development speed — not tool loyalty. What you’ll take away: … Read more
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
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
