{"id":358,"date":"2018-05-31T17:38:59","date_gmt":"2018-05-31T15:38:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.sql.marcus-belz.de\/?p=358"},"modified":"2026-05-07T01:06:39","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T23:06:39","slug":"formatting-sql-statements-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.sql.marcus-belz.de\/?p=358&lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Formatting SQL Statements (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dieser Artikel in Deutsch…<\/a><\/p>\n

Overview<\/h2>\n

Capital letters are often used to emphasize single words. This applies, for example, to German as a language. Latin, Greek, … Although there are languages that do distinct between upper and lower case (with respect to nouns), it has nevertheless prevailed in most languages. Even in English you can sometimes find nouns with a starting capital letter. That applies not only to the spoken language, but also to programming languages or naming conventions for programming. For example, the CamelCase<\/em> notation states that in compound words, the first letters of each word are capitalized.<\/p>\n

CamelCase<\/strong><\/p>\n

You can also find a trend where the first word of a compound word starts with a small letter:<\/p>\n

camelCase<\/strong><\/p>\n

With that, the use of capital letters is also a commonly used convention for marking words, identifiers, function names, etc. in compound expressions.<\/p>\n

The definition of rules for the notation of identifiers, function names, etc. is widely accepted among programmers and ultimately leads to a naming convention that determines how the language elements of a programming language are to be written. Still, many developers find it challenging to adhere to naming conventions. In fact, it can often be observed that developers are not consistent with their „own“ preferred convention.<\/p>\n

Compliance with naming conventions increases the readability of text in general and in programming. The same sentence again with deviations from generally known naming conventions that nouns are capitalized and adjectives, as well as verbs are written in small letters, the text becomes quickly illegible: „Compliance WITH nAming conventions INCREASES the Readability of text in general and in programming in Particular.“<\/p>\n

The following statement is defined in the view vTimeSeries<\/strong> in the database AdventureWorksDW2017<\/strong> and was slightly revised by me. I did not bother to follow any naming convention.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n

In the following statement, function names are capitalized, all field names are delimited by square brackets, data types are written in lower case letters, and finally the statement is consistently aligned and formatted …<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n

Whether or not the applied formatting is preferred by the reader, we probably can agree on that the second statement appears to be more readable.<\/p>\n

With that there are some points identified being an essential part in a naming convention. In addition, there are a few other things to be discussed:<\/p>\n