As of last week,, on the database tools team. I first started working with Steven at another company, doing database tools stuff, and now we’re back together again! Ok, that’s a little dramatic sounding. I used to work with Steven, and now I do again 🙂 I think this will lead to our tools becoming even stronger and to our users becoming even more productive.
This morning, I spent a few minutes helping Steven customize SQL Developer to make it do what it needed for him to be OK with how the code is generated, displayed, formatted, etc. Something I find Steven to be extremely good at is identifying code aesthetics. You look at code all day. Real Working Habbo Hack - The Best Software For Your. You probably dream about it, yes? So making the code as easy to read as possible is worth quite a penny or 2.
Dan's Tools www.cleancss.com/sql-beautify. When do you use SQL Viewer, Formatter. You can use this tool to make that code look pretty and readable. What Free SQL Formatting Tools exist? Command-line beautifier tool. Plugins >Poor Man's T-SQL Formatter >Format T-SQL code.
So I asked Steven What fonts are you using? Lucida Console, 14pt! Here’s what that looks like, this isn’t Steven’s code BTW. Hi Jeff, some helpful stuff here 😉 Any idea when 4.2 will be out? And if it will allow me to 1) Align column names in a select statement (e.g: SELECT a _______, b _______, c Rather than the current SELECT a, b, c.
) 2) Handle OR statements within brackets ‘better’ (i.e I want: WHERE a = b AND ( a 30) Rather than the current WHERE a = b AND ( a 30) 3) Insert a line break before a ‘SELECT’? The formatter becomes useless when I have several SQL statements in an editor as it conflates them all into a single massive block! There are the “de facto” standards, you know. I tried to post some code but the site apparently does not want to publish it. A problem I’ve found is about the “exit” statement. Try to format decently “exit when (condition)”.
And if you fix something, then something else is broken. The AND /OR in SQL are often aligned in and unreadable way. I am using SQLDeveloper for a long while. It’s good overall, except for the formatter and some other quirks (why the hell I cannot attach the session I want to the current editor?). The things which drive me nuts about the SQL Developer formatter are: 1) AND does not right align in a SQL statement, no matter what settings one tries. Even when “Right-Align Master Keywords” is checked, then SELECT, FROM, and WHERE right alight, but for some reason AND is off in its own little world, and the A usually left aligns with the W in WHERE.
2) Too many new lines. I don’t like INTO, LOOP, and () appearing on new lines, and prefer to have the option NOT to place them on a new line. 3) Your example of how to get columns to align with the comma to the left is not viable, because changing the indentation from 2 to 7 characters changes ALL indentation, and dramatically shifts everything to the right in most package bodies. I like many others would like the default to be for column names to align within SQL Developer as follows, and it shouldn’t require manually changing the GENERAL indentation: SELECT column 1, column 2, column3 4) There is no button for the current window to format like there are in other tools (PLSQL Developer, Toad), so I have to right click and then choose “Format”. 5) Select statements which follow and opening of a ref cursor are treated as strings rather than select statements and they become very difficult to read after the formatter has changed them.
One can still highlight each select statement and format it individually, but it can become very time consuming when there are lots of ref cursors. But my number 1 complaint about SQL Developer formatting is that it does not automatically place non-reserved words in lower case when I format. I have to highlight all of my package bodies, and do ctrl-” (double quote) until I get everything in lower case and then format, and only then will it display keywords in uppercase and non-keywords in lower case. It seems implicit, that if a user selects “Keywords Uppercase”, then that automatically means that they want all non-keywords to be lower case. I am thankful that SQL Developer is a free tool, and I am also glad that you are reaching out for feedback. Per the comments above, several people have pointed to Steven’s article which contains most commonly agreed upon SQL and PLSQL formatting standards. I see that Nigel Carr placed Steven’s Standards document in the exchange, and although “nothing is in the works” within your group to implement Steven’s standards, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that will change in the very near future.