I don't write SQL like that. He has a good point about using a line for each and/or condition in the where clause and starting with either one (easier to remov

I don't write SQL like that. He has a good point about using a line for each and/or condition in the where clause and starting with either one (easier to remove). But I don't think all queries should be written in several lines. If a query is simple enough (e.g. no aggregation, group by, having and at maximum one where condition and few fields to select), it can be written in one line, like: SELECT field FROM table WHERE value = @value That's easy and straightforward to understand and readable (which was initially part of SQL's goals, although we can discuss at a later date how successful that was). Complicated SQL queries - which are bound to happen - follow - in my style - a more straightforward approach: There are new lines after every grouping (FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, SORT BY, HAVING, etc.) and indenting. In fact, I prefer to indent my fields twice, because I consider FROM, WHERE, etc. to be subject to SELECT (even if part of an INSERT). I also tend to avoid extra keywords such as 'OUTER' in 'LEFT OUTER JOIN' (there is no such thing as 'LEFT INNER JOIN'). And then I follow each JOIN statement (indented compared to the ground table in from) by the table name, a new line, an indent and the ON condition. If another table relies on that table being joined, I indent it further to indicate that, so I can quickly look at my code to see what tables goes through which (which is useful if you have a lot of relationship tables). Should be noted, however, I most commonly write towards Sybase at work, which tends to have no preference - style wise - on whether you write the keywords in upper case. My co-workers do not, so I don't either. But when I write my own projects against MySQL/MariaDB, I use upper case. But I generally follow the same style.