My general rule-of-thumb is that trivial things can have syntax constraints relaxed, as long as it makes them more readable, not less. I may adopt the style of the article for a complex query, but for something simpler I may go with:
SELECT foo, bar, baz
FROM my_table
WHERE foo=1 AND bar > 10
GROUP BY bar
ORDER BY baz
But that becomes less readable after more than a couple fields or conditions for each line. Until that point, I think it's fairly concise and efficient.
That said, if your SQL is intermixed with code whose sole purpose isn't to deal with that SQL, you are probably in for hurt later on anyway. If it is safely quarantined into data access routines of some sort, the size doesn't really matter, since the function or method containing the query should really be about that query.
My general rule-of-thumb is that trivial things can have syntax constraints relaxed, as long as it makes them more readable, not less. I may adopt the style of the article for a complex query, but for something simpler I may go with:
But that becomes less readable after more than a couple fields or conditions for each line. Until that point, I think it's fairly concise and efficient.That said, if your SQL is intermixed with code whose sole purpose isn't to deal with that SQL, you are probably in for hurt later on anyway. If it is safely quarantined into data access routines of some sort, the size doesn't really matter, since the function or method containing the query should really be about that query.