So here I am, laboring furiously to get my refactoring tools polished up for Insight, and the one feature that I would really like to get implemented is a spiffy coding-standards compliance tool for SQL. One would think that it would be a simple matter of digging up the most widely accepted standard, allowing the user to modify that standard to suit their firm’s needs, and then applying it to the script in question. And that isn’t really rocket science. Except for one thing.
There isn’t really one widely-accepted PL-SQL coding standard.
Now, I’m not going to just come out and say that Oracle is horrible at documentation. No, wait, I am going to say that Oracle is horrible at documentation. Aside from the fact that the vast majority of it is nearly incomprehensible, incomplete, and badly formatted, they tend to gloss over things that concern the really important folks: those who have to use the damned thing.
A coding standard is a really important thing. Without it, you end up with ten-year-old databases that have passed through a plethora of hands and no two sets of hands agree about how the code should be laid out, how the variables and objects should be named, how things should be cased, and where commas should be placed. Sounds trivial, I know. But when you have to come in ten years later and try to reconcile all those competing non-standards into a single, cohesive “product” that makes sense so that you can maintain it, it’s a nightmare.
We need a driving vision for a SQL coding standard. And we need it from a single source, with some authority behind it. But it can’t just establish a standard that comes down with some heavy-handed practice that isn’t thought out. As much as I hate to admit it, Oracle has been doing this a long time, and they’re the logical choice to start this movement, with lots of input from the community.
On the other hand, this could be an entirely community-driven thing, a grass-roots effort to establish a common SQL coding standard. On this blog, Lewis Cunningham discusses such a project, but it doesn’t appear to have taken off. It’s a pity, because I think it’d be well worth the effort.
Who knows, maybe I’ll slide on over to Google Apps and see what I can do to start such a grassroots effort myself. I’m tired of sitting around waiting for a consensus to just pop up out of thin air. You’ve got to start somewhere, right?
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