Formatting your SQL properly is kinda helpful ...

While it may be nice syntactic sugar, it isn't portable SQL. And, I don't see how the following is difficult to work with ...

INSERT INTO foo_table
       ( foo, bar, baz, foo1, bar1, baz1 )
VALUES ( ?,   ?,   ?,   ?,    ?,    ?    )
[download]

It's all about how you format your SQL. Personally, I format my SELECT statements as such:

SELECT xx.foo
      ,xx.bar
      ,yy.baz
      ,COUNT(*) AS count
  FROM foo_table xx
      ,bar_table yy
 WHERE xx.abcd      = yy.abcd
   AND xx.asdfghjkl = yy.asdfghjkl
 GROUP BY xx.foo
         ,yy.bar
         ,yy.baz
[download]

Notice where the commas and where the equals signs are. Also, note how I line up the whitespace after the upper-cased keyword. The more you can say in your formatting, the better.

------
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Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

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Re: Formatting your SQL properly is kinda helpful ... by mpeppler (Vicar) on Jan 16, 2004 at 19:35 UTC
Personally, I format my SELECT statements as such: I use the same format - and when you have a large select with lots of ugly stuff in the WHERE clause (or in the SELECT clause for that matter) it really helps to make it readable. Michael	[reply]
Re: Formatting your SQL properly is kinda helpful ... by hardburn (Abbot) on Jan 16, 2004 at 19:42 UTC
I was mostly talking about a `SET` being used in an interactive session. In a static SQL statement set into a larger program, it's generally not very useful to know that a given column lines up with some question mark. As long as there is one question mark per column (minus any statically-defined columns), it doesn't matter. In any case, my programs usually generate placeholders on the fly (using code similar to what I wrote in another node in this thread), so there is little point in formatting the SQL at all. In an interactive session, I'm usually doing a lot of quick-and-dirty work with statements that will be thrown away once the session is over, so I don't take the time to indent the code. `SET` would be much nicer here. Update: One other thing--formatting the `(cols . . ) VALUES (? . . . )` statement like that will break down for very long lines. ---- I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident. -- Schemer `: () { :\|:& };:` Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated	[reply] [d/l] [select]