T-SQL Formatters

The other day I was given a truly horribly formatted piece of SQL. Something a bit like this only worse, and with plenty of dynamic SQL.

CREATE TRIGGER [Sales].[iduSalesOrderDetail] ON [Sales].[SalesOrderDetail]
AFTER INSERT, DELETE, UPDATE AS
Begin
DECLARE @Count int;
SET @Count = @@ROWCOUNT;
IF @Count = 0
RETURN;
SET nocount on;
begin try
-- If inserting or updating these columns
IF update([ProductID]) OR UPDATE([OrderQty]) or Update([UnitPrice]) OR update([UnitPriceDiscount])
-- Insert record into TransactionHistory
begin
INSERT into [Production].[TransactionHistory]
([ProductID],[ReferenceOrderID]
,[ReferenceOrderLineID]
,[TransactionType]
,[TransactionDate]
,[Quantity]
,[ActualCost])
SELECT
inserted.[ProductID] ,inserted.[SalesOrderID]
,inserted.[SalesOrderDetailID]
,'S',GETDATE() ,inserted.[OrderQty]
,inserted.[UnitPrice]
FROM inserted
INNER join [Sales].[SalesOrderHeader]
ON inserted.[SalesOrderID] = [Sales].[SalesOrderHeader].[SalesOrderID];
UPDATE [Person].[Person]
SET [Demographics].modify('declare default element namespace
"http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2004/07/adventure-works/IndividualSurvey";
replace value of (/IndividualSurvey/TotalPurchaseYTD)[1]
with data(/IndividualSurvey/TotalPurchaseYTD)[1] + sql:column ("inserted.LineTotal")') from inserted
INNER JOIN [Sales].[SalesOrderHeader] AS SOH
ON inserted.[SalesOrderID] = SOH.[SalesOrderID] INNER JOIN [Sales].[Customer] AS C
ON SOH.[CustomerID] = C.[CustomerID]
WHERE C.[PersonID] = [Person].[Person].[BusinessEntityID];
END;
-- Update SubTotal in SalesOrderHeader record. Note that this causes the
-- SalesOrderHeader trigger to fire which will update the RevisionNumber.
UPDATE [Sales].[SalesOrderHeader]

I have a hard time working with code that’s so badly formatted I can’t read it. Normally I’d just format it myself, but this was a good dozen pages long. So what did I do? I ran to twitter screaming for help.

#sqlhelp What's a good free T-SQL formatter?

― Kenneth Fisher (@_@) (@sqlstudent144) May 11, 2018

And I got a lot of responses! Here were the recommendations followed by who recommended them:

TSQLTidy
Rob Volk ( b / t )
Buck Woody ( b / t ) PoorSQL
Randolph West ( b / t )
Tim Radney ( b / t )
Big Mike ( t ) Apex SQL Refactor
Kendal Van Dyke ( b / t )
Michael Sosis ( t ) Operations Studio
Gavin Draper ( b / t ) SQL Format
Kristy Mishra ( t )
Aalamjeet Singh Rangi ( b / t ) The Simple-Talk Code Prettifier
Jen McCown (b/ t ) SQLInForm SQL Formatter
Aalamjeet Singh Rangi ( b / t )

I haven’t tested most of these but from what I understand none of them (for obvious reasons) will handle dynamic SQL and the ones I tested won’t handle the multi-line breaks. For the multi-line breaks I just did a regex search and replace, then used the formatter.

Now, as I was writing this

Brent Erik Darling ( b ) wrote a similar post so I’m including it for completeness. Quick tips for debugging large stored procedures See tip 1