Postgres OnLine Journal   

Both Josh Berkus and Hubert made blog entries about our last excerpt. In general I will start off by saying that we are more or less in agreement on what is good SQL coding format.

Here are the things I think we can all agree on

• SQL Keywords should be upper cased
• Field names should be prefixed with their tables especially when you have a multi-join statement involved
• Use JOIN syntax instead of stuffing everything in the WHERE though we are highly against just saying JOIN. We prefer INNER JOIN

The major points of contention I think are

• Should you use aliases over tables and if you use aliases should you keep them short or more descriptive. Josh thinks table names should be used where possible and when aliases are used they should be longer than a few characters and Hubert agrees with us that short aliases are fine and in fact desirable. I think we all agree aliases should be meaningful when used, but our idea of what it means to be meaningful is a little different.
• In use of JOIN syntax -- we prefer using INNER JOIN instead of using just JOIN and in fact find it quite irritating that PostgreSQL rewrites our INNERs as JOIN. I suspect Hubert and Josh and many other PostgreSQL folk are on the other side of the fence on this. The reason we feel strongly about this is there are so many kinds of JOINS - INNER JOIN, RIGHT JOIN, LEFT JOIN, CROSS JOIN, FULL JOIN, and the horrid NATURAL JOIN (that should be shot and put out of its misery). To just say JOIN to us is just confusing.
• While you can write LEFT OUTER JOIN, the OUTER is kind of pointless because no one goes around writing LEFT INNER JOINS
• Use well supported standards where possible. This means CURRENT_TIMESTAMP instead of now(). now() is not in all databases, but most relational databases support CURRENT_TIMESTAMP