I often watch in horror what some people suggest is 'good SQL'. You even find plenty of those humongous multi-hundred-line beasts on the official PostgreSQL wik

I often watch in horror what some people suggest is 'good SQL'. You even find plenty of those humongous multi-hundred-line beasts on the official PostgreSQL wiki, a single statement going over several pages if you were to print it out. Sure that's hard to debug. What I do in such cases is using many intermediate views, sometimes just named like `_foobar_010`, `_foobar_020` and so on, and a single `create (materialized) view foobar ... select from _foobar_120 ...`. That way, I can rely on the DB caring for basic structural soundness, giving error messages that are better localized than "something is wrong near ','", and I can visually (or, indeed, programmatically) debug all the intermediate steps.