SQL Pretty Print

Pretty printing versus plain formatting

The two terms overlap, but pretty printing carries a slightly higher bar. Plain formatting just adds line breaks; pretty printing aims for a layout that reads well — clauses aligned to the same margin, list items stacked, and nesting expressed through indentation rather than guesswork. The goal is a query you can take in like a paragraph: top to bottom, with the meaning visible in the shape.

That matters most for the queries you keep. A throwaway one-off can stay ugly, but a view definition, a report query or a stored procedure will be read dozens of times over its life. Pretty printing it once pays off every time someone opens the file.

How to prettify a query

• Paste the SQL into the input panel.
• Pick your indent width and keyword case from the options bar.
• Decide whether AND and OR start new lines — usually they should, so each condition stands alone.
• Copy the polished result, or download it as a .sql file.

Because the output updates live, you can flip between two-space and four-space indentation, or between uppercase and lowercase keywords, and instantly see which style reads best for the query in front of you.

Pretty printed, with conditions split

SELECT
  o.id,
  o.total
FROM
  orders o
WHERE
  o.status = 'paid'
  AND o.total > 100
  AND o.region IN ('EU', 'US')
ORDER BY
  o.total DESC

Each filter on its own line means you can comment one out, reorder them, or spot a redundant condition without re-reading the whole clause. That is the practical payoff of a well pretty-printed WHERE.

Consistency across a team

When a team agrees on one pretty-print style, every query in the codebase starts to look the same — and sameness is a feature. New engineers read faster because the layout is predictable, diffs stay focused on real changes, and nobody argues about whether keywords should be uppercase in code review. A browser-based prettifier is the lowest-friction way to enforce that: there is nothing to install, it works on any machine, and because it runs locally, even queries that touch confidential tables never leave the laptop they are pasted on.