SQL Standards

SQL comes in a variety of flavours; writing a standards guide for each of them would result in an entire page on its own. For this reason, we had an engineering day at our company in 2022 that tasked a team with investigating the best way for us to keep SQL writing concise and in a way that should not cause formatting issues and arguments in merge requests. The resulted in a Shed specific set of rules that plug and play nicely with the tool SQLFLUFF.

Add the configuration file called sqlfluff.config to your project directory or somewhere referenced/linked to in your code editor of choice. The configuration setting:

[sqlfluff]
verbose = 1
templater = jinja
exclude_rules = L003,L036,L039
output_line_length = 121
sql_file_exts=.sql

[sqlfluff:rules]
tab_space_size = 5
max_line_length = 250
indent_unit = space
comma_style = leading
allow_scalar = True
single_table_references = consistent
unquoted_identifiers_policy = aliases

[sqlfluff:rules:L010] # Keywords
capitalisation_policy = upper

[sqlfluff:rules:L014]
extended_capitalisation_policy = lower

[sqlfluff:rules:L030] # function names
capitalisation_policy = lower

[sqlfluff:rules:L052] # final semicolon
multiline_newline = True

Documentation for the tool.