SQL: The Last Bastion of Acceptable Shouting
Description
This meme utilizes the classic 'The Most Interesting Man in the World' format, featuring a dapper, gray-bearded man in a suit seated at a table with a bottle of Dos Equis beer. The image is overlaid with a punchline in two parts, using a bold, white, all-caps font. The top text reads, 'I DON'T ALWAYS TYPE IN ALL CAPS,'. The bottom text completes the phrase with, 'BUT WHEN I DO, I'M PROBABLY WRITING A SQL QUERY.' The humor is rooted in a long-standing, albeit informal, convention within the developer community to write SQL keywords (like SELECT, FROM, WHERE) in uppercase. This practice is done to improve readability by distinguishing the language's commands from the user-defined table and column names. For experienced developers, especially those with a background in database management or backend systems, this is an instantly recognizable and relatable habit from a bygone era of coding standards that still persists today
Comments
18Comment deleted
My linter auto-formats my SQL to lowercase. I change it back to uppercase. We've been locked in this passive-aggressive merge conflict for three years
We don’t uppercase SELECT for readability - we’re just yelling so the database can hear us over the ORM whispering 10,000 tiny queries in production
The real tragedy isn't typing SELECT * FROM users WHERE 1=1 in all caps - it's explaining to the junior why your 20-year-old stored procedures look like they're SHOUTING at the database while their ORM quietly whispers camelCase sweet nothings
The irony here cuts deep: we've spent decades arguing about camelCase vs snake_case, tabs vs spaces, and whether semicolons are necessary - yet somehow the entire industry collectively agreed that SQL keywords should be SHOUTED AT in ALL CAPS. It's the one coding convention where looking like you're angry-typing is actually considered professional. Meanwhile, your linter is configured to enforce lowercase everything else, creating a cognitive dissonance so profound that junior devs genuinely wonder if their Caps Lock key is possessed when writing their first JOIN statement
ORMs whisper in camelCase; grizzled DBAs make their subqueries SCREAM
SQL is case-insensitive, but on-call humans aren't - uppercasing SELECT is the only optimizer hint code review reliably accepts
ALL CAPS is how I tell the ORM to step aside - this SELECT is negotiating directly with the optimizer
or a meme Comment deleted
Even it's not required, I prefer to write SQL keywords in caps because readability Comment deleted
Well yeah, that's what people did before syntax highlighting. Many languages of that time period have that. JCL/COBOL, Fortran, flavours of BASIC… Comment deleted
For the sake of readability, I do the opposite thing: SQL keywords in lowercase, table & column names in uppercase. Comment deleted
Are not backticks enough to clearly distinguish table and field names from keywords? (You do use backticks, don't you?) Comment deleted
I don't, unless I need to do it for some names that collide with keywords. Well different letter cases are far more distinguishable from afar than words in backticks, don't you think? Comment deleted
I do everything in lowercase lol Comment deleted
Lel Comment deleted
i prefer camelcase for readability SeLeCt ToP 2 * FrOm CuStOmErS; Comment deleted
It’s wave case Comment deleted
yeah, thnx Comment deleted