Best practices for writing SQL queries
This is an aside, but a colleague years back showed me his preferred method formatting SQL statements, and I've always found it to be the best in terms of readability, I just wish there was more automated tool support for this format. The idea is to line up the first value from each clause. Visually it makes it extremely easy to "chunk" the statement by clause, e.g.:<p><pre><code>  SELECT a.foo, b.bar, g.zed
    FROM alpha a
    JOIN beta b ON a.id = b.alpha_id
    LEFT JOIN gamma g ON b.id = g.beta_id
   WHERE a.val > 1
     AND b.col < 2
   ORDER BY a.foo</code></pre>