Options!
When you’re writing code, you have some options when it comes to leaving comments:
- Double dashes at the start of a line:
-- Comment! - Block quotes around a section of text:
/* Comment! */ - No comment whatsoever:
The problem with the double-dash method is that there’s no terminator for it. If you end up pasting the query from a DMV where it’s not all nicely formatted, it’s pretty likely going to end up all on a single line.
With a long enough query, it can be a real pain to scroll across looking for comments and separating them to a new line so you can run the query.
What really sucks is that tools that can automatically format T-SQL for you can’t handle this either. If I could just right click and solve the problem, I’d be talking about that instead.
So, please: If you’re going to put comments in your code, use the block quotes.
Thanks for reading!
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Revealing! Never thought ’bout that Thank you for sharing!
Hmmm, I’d never thought of it that way. Brilliant!
I never thought about this. I dont think im ever going to comment using double dashes again.
Holy cow!
This is the best T-SQL hack after `SELECT TOP 0 * INTO new_table FROM old_table`
I was once told that comments without a terminator (double-dashes) cause SQL Server to perform extra work when interacting with the code – however miniscule – vs. block quotes. Have you heard that before? Is there a way to prove that out?
No, I’d never heard that.
You could always hit ctrl-f and do a search for the double-hyphen string. That’s not too much overhead.
Maybe if there’s just one, but if there’s a lot of comments and old code quoted out, it can become time consuming.