SQL Coding Standards To Each His Own   

Getting back to Josh. Imagine a world filled with Josh Berkus wannabies taking his advice to its logical conclusion and what you get is this.

I found a great cartoon depicting this somewhere, but don't seem to find this at the moment.

Yes we would be those disrespectful people who would be guilty of writing that statement as follows because those extra characters are not only more to type, but they actually get in the way of targetting join mistakes and where is the indentation. INDENTATION is the most important thing:

SELECT fl.foot AS fl_foot, fr.foot AS fr_foot, mouth.mouth
	FROM foot AS fl INNER JOIN foot AS fr ON fl.person = fr.person
		INNER JOIN mouth ON (mouth.person = fr.person)
	WHERE mouth.location = fl.location AND fl.foot_position = 'L' AND fr.foot_position = 'R'

Indenting, uppercasing SQL keywords, and using AS are the most important conventions we try to hold to.

Of course this is no offense to Josh - just a little nit-pick. Kind of reminds me of working on PostGIS, and one day to my disbelief I discovered the philosophies of 2 people I have great respect for look like this.

	
if (   lots_of_spaces_and_lots_of_under_scores && !camels  ){
	yeah();
}
	

	
if(!one) scream();	
	

and of course all I could think -- What barbarians! How could I even share the same planet with these people?

When all is said and done, probably the most important thing when working on a team, is that everyone grudgingly agrees to follow the same sane standard and the code created done by 20 programmers looks like it was done by the same person.