title: Oracle Coding Standards Feature Implementation
body: <p>Okay, I have reached a sort of an impasse.</p>
  
  <p>In my open source project, a .NET-based Oracle database browser, I've implemented a bunch of refactoring tools. So far, so good. The one feature I was really hoping to implement was a big "Global Reformat" that would make the code (scripts, functions, procedures, packages, views, etc.) standards compliant. (I've always been saddened by the lack of decent SQL refactoring tools, and wanted to do something about it.)</p>
  
  <p>Unfortunatey, I am discovering, much to my chagrin, that there doesn't seem to be any one widely-used or even "generally accepted" standard for PL-SQL. That kind of puts a crimp on my implementation plans.</p>
  
  <p>My search has been fairly exhaustive. I've found lots of conflicting documents, threads and articles and the opinions are fairly diverse. (Comma placement, of all things, seems to generate quite a bit of debate.)</p>
  
  <p>So I'm faced with a couple of options:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Add a feature that lets the user customize the standard and then reformat the code according to that standard.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>—OR—</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Add a feature that lets the user customize the standard and simply generate a violations list like StyleCop does, leaving the SQL untouched.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>In my mind, the first option saves the end-users a lot of work, but runs the risk of modifying SQL in potentially unwanted ways. The second option runs the risk of generating lots of warnings and doing no work whatsoever. (It'd just be generally annoying.)</p>
  
  <p>In either scenario, I still have no standard to go by. What I'd need to know from you guys is kind of poll-ish, but kind of not. If you were going to use a tool of this nature, what parts of your SQL code would you want it to warn you about or fix?</p>
  
  <p>Again, I'm just at a loss due to a lack of a cohesive standard. And given that there isn't anything out there that's officially published by Oracle, I think this is something the community could weigh in on. Also, given the way that voting works on SO, the votes would help to establish the popularity of a given "refactoring." </p>
  
  <p>P.S. The engine parses SQL into an expression tree so it can robustly analyze the SQL and reformat it. There should be quite a bit that we can do to correct the format of the SQL. But I am thinking that for the first release of the thing, <em>layout</em> is the primary concern. Though it is worth noting that the thing already has refactorings for converting keywords to upper case, and identifiers to lower case.</p>