Capitalization

Scripting languages are wonderful things. They use subsets of English and are therefore easy to learn (EG: update, delete, get, put).

However capitalization is totally redundant. A capital letter marks the beginning of a sentence, but scripts do not use sentences.

One alphabet is enough (a to z) who needs another one (A to Z) that is completely equivalent?

Imagine responding to the adhoc query “Please email me a list of most ordered items over Christmas” with “in what font?” lol

Although … one trick that I have used over the years, with having two alphabets,  is to temporarily change the capitalization of text to double-check for myself that Replication etc is actually working (before the days of tracer-token poo sticks). Changing the data look without changing the data value.

Another sneaky trick is making mass changes to data whilst adding a flag (to only the changed data). For example changing every field containing ‘unsubscribe’ to ‘uNsubscribe’, or ‘yes’to ‘yEs’.

And then repeating with un-flagged fields until only ‘unsuscribe’ or ‘Yep’ remain (lol).

This (typical DBA belt & braces) method almost always guarantees you will not induce any unintended processing errors further down the line, as the data always remains the same length, type and meaning.