3 ms·

Strings do give you the ability to copy them right into your code from the SQL console after testing.

smcl 5y ago
While that is true, I think most queries would involve parameters of some sort, so those would need to be fiddled with at the very least after pasting to your code, plus you'd also want to format them so they don't look that out of place. And at that point you've likely got a single maybe-weirdly indented query that appears as a plain string, which is fine if you have just a couple but can get a little tricky if you have a larger application. I'm not super religious about this - a colleague and I were discussing Hangfire.io's SQL Server code which has inline SQL[0] and we ended up agreeing that it's fine - but if I'm writing an application with a SQL backend I'm definitely leaning towards using something like EF in .NET [0] = https://github.com/HangfireIO/Hangfire/blob/master/src/Hangfire.SqlServer/SqlServerStorage.cs#L496-L499 https://github.com/HangfireIO/Hangfire/blob/master/src/Hangf...
- spfzero 5y ago
  True about the params. I guess I've always put the queries in as "here" strings, so they do look out of place in the sense that the structure is different. In most cases the sql was in a file with a bunch of other "lowest" level db calls, so I kind of got used to that being the look of those particular source files. Looked at the Hangfire code and the last two methods there look a lot like what I used to do in the old C# days. Except I'd have whole files of db stuff like that, and other files for the C# code that called them.
  - smcl 5y ago
    Ah neat so there's a very real separation between the code itself and the queries, that I think addresses the weirdness of seeing a block of SQL in a string literal that I find a bit jarring. Out of curiousity, is this Perl by any chance? I haven't really seen here docs in use outside shell or Perl scripts
    - spfzero 5y ago
      Haven't used Perl but they're in a lot of languages, Lisps, Python ("""), Ruby, PHP etc. but C# does at least have the verbatim-type of strings which would be good enough. Don't use the interpolation features though, use the @params and let the SQL driver do the replacements.

smcl 5y ago

While that is true, I think most queries would involve parameters of some sort, so those would need to be fiddled with at the very least after pasting to your code, plus you'd also want to format them so they don't look that out of place. And at that point you've likely got a single maybe-weirdly indented query that appears as a plain string, which is fine if you have just a couple but can get a little tricky if you have a larger application. I'm not super religious about this - a colleague and I were discussing Hangfire.io's SQL Server code which has inline SQL[0] and we ended up agreeing that it's fine - but if I'm writing an application with a SQL backend I'm definitely leaning towards using something like EF in .NET [0] = https://github.com/HangfireIO/Hangfire/blob/master/src/Hangfire.SqlServer/SqlServerStorage.cs#L496-L499 https://github.com/HangfireIO/Hangfire/blob/master/src/Hangf...

spfzero 5y ago
True about the params. I guess I've always put the queries in as "here" strings, so they do look out of place in the sense that the structure is different. In most cases the sql was in a file with a bunch of other "lowest" level db calls, so I kind of got used to that being the look of those particular source files. Looked at the Hangfire code and the last two methods there look a lot like what I used to do in the old C# days. Except I'd have whole files of db stuff like that, and other files for the C# code that called them.
- smcl 5y ago
  Ah neat so there's a very real separation between the code itself and the queries, that I think addresses the weirdness of seeing a block of SQL in a string literal that I find a bit jarring. Out of curiousity, is this Perl by any chance? I haven't really seen here docs in use outside shell or Perl scripts
  - spfzero 5y ago
    Haven't used Perl but they're in a lot of languages, Lisps, Python ("""), Ruby, PHP etc. but C# does at least have the verbatim-type of strings which would be good enough. Don't use the interpolation features though, use the @params and let the SQL driver do the replacements.