I don’t know if it’s just my obsessive compulsive tendencies, but I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to code style. It’s probably partially due to my various programming instructors all beating it into me, to the point where half your grade on coding assignments was based purely on coding style (commenting and formatting), but I digress.
I’ve had the opportunity over the past couple years to play around with SQL quite a bit, and in some cases even getting my hands dirty and writing some stored procedures. Along the way I’ve noticed that a lot of people apparently don’t like to bother with good formatting when it comes to writing SQL code (yes I know it’s not actual ‘code’) and it bugs the heck out of me when I attempt to go back and test/troubleshoot it.
Which leads me to the whole reason for this post, the Instant SQL Formatter from Gudo Software. This handy little online tool will kindly consume any SQL code you throw at it, and spit it back out all pretty-like. This can come in especially handy when you’re looking through auto-generated SQL code, which looks especially ugly. There are a number of other output modes you can select, but the one I find most handy is the HTML output (with syntax highlighting) which is very useful if you want to share some SQL code and have it more easily readable.
So go check it out and enjoy the pleasures of well formatted code.
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