Recently, I had dinner with a few friends who work at big tech companies, and somehow the conversation drifted to code standards. One guy, who does backend work at an e-commerce giant in Hangzhou, said his team recently did a code review, and the results were shocking—the most common issues weren't logic bugs or performance problems, but SQL written too casually. Mixed-case keywords, messy indentation, line breaks wherever the mood struck—a slightly complex query could turn into a maze. The manager laid down the law on the spot: from now on, SQL must be formatted, and anything that doesn't pass gets sent back for rewriting.
This isn't an isolated case. I asked around, and friends at several internet companies in Beijing and Shenzhen said their teams are also getting serious. In the past, as long as SQL ran and returned correct results, nobody cared what it looked like. But now it's different—code standards have gone from "suggestions" to "requirements," and SQL formatting has been singled out as a hard metric.
Why the sudden strictness? Simply put, the cost of team collaboration is too high. Think about it: a project with a dozen people—today you write a subquery nested three levels deep, tomorrow someone else writes a union query with all uppercase keywords, and the day after that another person writes a complex JOIN with no comments at all. Over time, nobody dares touch that table, and changing one line of code takes half an hour just to guess what the original author was trying to do. Not to mention when something goes wrong online, the person troubleshooting sees that pile of SQL and their blood pressure spikes instantly.
There's also a very practical reason—many companies are now building SQL review platforms that automatically scan code when it's submitted. If your formatting isn't up to standard, you can't even get a merge request through. Some teams have even included SQL formatting in performance evaluations. It sounds a bit exaggerated, but it's actually happening. My friend in Hangzhou said his team now tracks SQL compliance pass rates weekly, and whoever comes in last has to buy milk tea for the whole team.
So what do you do? You can't manually adjust spaces and line breaks every time you finish writing SQL—that's too inefficient. That's where SQL formatting tools come in. After you write a statement, paste it into the tool, and with one click it cleans up messy SQL into something neat and tidy. Keywords are unified to uppercase, indentation is aligned, line breaks go where they should, and spaces are added where needed. Complex queries can even be automatically broken down into clearly structured clauses, so the logic is obvious at a glance.
Don't underestimate this step. Once formatting is unified, code review efficiency improves significantly. Before, reviewing a SQL statement meant spending five minutes just understanding the structure; now you can scan it and immediately see if there's a problem. When new people take over old code, they don't have to struggle with that pile of "ancient script" anymore. One friend even told me that after his team started using a SQL formatting tool, they had fewer production incidents, because some logic errors became especially obvious after formatting—you could spot them at a glance.
Of course, tools are just an aid; the core is developing the habit. My own approach is: after writing a slightly complex SQL statement, I throw it into a formatting tool first and see if the cleaned-up structure matches what I intended. Sometimes after formatting I realize I wrote an unnecessary nested query, or a JOIN condition was in the wrong place. This kind of self-check is much more effective than just eyeballing it.
Ultimately, when big tech companies start checking SQL standards, what they're checking isn't the format itself, but the rigorous attitude behind it. SQL is the most direct tool for working with data, and how well it's written directly affects system stability and team collaboration efficiency. In the past, everyone thought it just needed to run; now that's not enough—it needs to run beautifully and be understandable to others.
If you haven't used a SQL formatting tool yet, I suggest finding one and trying it now. There are open-source and online options—just pick one that feels right. It takes only a few minutes, but once you develop the habit, you'll find your SQL skills have quietly leveled up. After all, in this increasingly competitive environment, if you can't even manage SQL formatting, it's a bit embarrassing to call yourself a coder.