Comment by egeozcan
I don't know about anti patterns but what I like to do is putting 1=1 after each WHERE to align ANDs nicely and this is enough to create huge dramas in PR reviews.
I don't know about anti patterns but what I like to do is putting 1=1 after each WHERE to align ANDs nicely and this is enough to create huge dramas in PR reviews.
Using `WHERE 1=1` is such a common pattern that I seriously doubt it's realistically increasing "cognitive load".
I've seen it used in dozens of places, in particular places that programmatically generate the AND parts of queries. I wasn't really that confused the first time I saw it and I was never confused any time after that.
I use `WHERE true` for this. Very little cognitive load parsing that. And it makes AND conditions more copy pastable. Effectively the trailing comma of SQL where clauses
I absolutely cannot see how this would do what IDE formatting can’t, but admittedly the last time I wrote any significant amount of SQL directly was in a still-totally-relevant Perl 5 application. Could you give an example or link to a file in a public repository or whatever that would show this practice in context?
> what I like to do is putting 1=1 after each WHERE to align ANDs nicely
Frankly, that sounds like one of those things that totally makes sense in the author’s head, but inconsiderately creates terrible code ergonomics and needless cognitive load for anyone reading it. You know to just ignore those expressions when you’re reading it because you wrote it and know they have no effect, but to a busy code reviewer, it’s annoying functionless clutter making their job more annoying. “Wait, that should do nothing… but does it actually do something hackish and ‘clever’ that they didn’t comment? Let’s think about this for a minute.” Use an editor with proper formatting capability, and don’t use executable expressions for formatting in code that other people look at.