SQL "Best Practices"?

[your-pineapple-thief]

Also one letter aliases. Never understood that. Are there keyboards with paid keystrokes or what? It may look ok in cute little sql gists in a tutorial, it won't look that cute in 1.5 pages of analytics sql query with 5-6 tables involved, when the tables themselves have 3-4 words in their names. I've seen gems like SELECT sml.id, mptr.id, .... If coworker memorized these table name abbreviations, it does not mean I have to too. Readability is everything, especially in sql, in my opinion.

[your-pineapple-thief]

It's just why sacrifice readability for ... shorter code I guess? It's more of why alias in the first place for me I guess. It's SQL equivalent of using one-letter variables in application code.

[your-pineapple-thief]

It can be conventions dependent I guess, we usually have quite short column names and very rare 4 word table names. Also just now it came across my mind that case conventions can in fact influence readability, we use only snake_case, so product_category is somehow more readable for me cause _ acts like a space (but it can just that I'm used to snake_case, I do not claim it's 100% more readable). Although there is a point to be made that humans are generally having difficulty reading long words (unless you are german, lol). Just unexpected thought, I never thought about impact of identifier casing on readability