Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjibson | Hacker News Reader

Author here. Based on feedback I am going to make a sqlfmt binary for easy editor integration.

You can currently already do this by using the CockroachDB binary (https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/releases/v2.1.0-beta.2018...) but understandably people want a more minimal solution.

View on HN

Hey, thank you for the formatter! I really like the way it formats statements. Although I have found two issues:

1. It lowercases table and field names, rendering the formatted statement useless for a project with not exclusively lowercased names. Could you please fix this?

2. I'd appreciate accepting common placeholder "?" as a valid part of the SQL statement so that we can format queries with placeholders. Would that be possible?

The formatter adheres to CockroachDB rules which is why it acts like you describe. Case is insensitive in names unless you double quote it. Postgres-style (CockroachDB is one) uses "$1" for placeholders instead of "?". Adding "?" would complicate our grammar enough that it's not worth adding it.

sqlfmt is not super useful for non-postgres grammars.

Consider those of us stuck with Java adapters to Postgres, which means Postgres syntax but ? for placeholders.

Is that a thing? The Java driver must actually parse those and convert them. Java is crazy. https://github.com/mjibson/sqlfmt/issues/25 is the issue to track '?' as placeholders.

It might be crazy, but having just gotten my hands dirty with some seriously DB programming, JDBC has a hell of a lot of value in my view.

I understand it about placeholders. Fair enough. I can do quick s/\?/\$1/g, no prob.

Still how about not lowercasing identifiers? This is actually a blocker, I'm sure you see it:)

Hey! I love your tool.

Any chance of allowing keywords that are specific to a SQL implementation? (e.g. PostgreSQL)

If I enter "CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW ... WITH DATA;" in for example, it would tell me "materialized" and "with data" is wrong.

As CockroachDB matures these kinds of things will slowly get added.

But sqlfmt doesn't (currently) have a goal to format all SQL, just cockroach SQL.

I thought it was a ploy to get people to install cockroach, that's what I'm doing now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com