Discussion on: Comments Are The Only "Code Smell"

[Adam Nathaniel Davis]

In contrast, I often see queries written something like this, and I hate it:

SELECT firstName, lastName, accessLevel FROM person AS p1
LEFT JOIN permission AS p2 ON p2.personId = p1.personId
WHERE p1.personId IN (<someListOfPersonIds>) AND p2.isDefault = true
ORDER BY p1.lastName, p1.firstName

If this queries tends to "grow" over time, as the dev team decides that they need to add more return values and more JOINs to it, it becomes ever-more-difficult to simply read.

[John Carroll]

I see what you mean. Not magical but definitely better. I use SQL infrequently but I've written queries the second way and now I'm going to write them your way. It is much clearer 👍.

Thanks!