Comment by DrewADesign
Comment by DrewADesign 9 hours ago
> 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.
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.