Are there any published coding style guidelines for SQL?

Since asking this question I have written a public SQL style guide that is compatible with Joe Celko's SQL Programming Style book under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence.

It is available over at www.sqlstyle.guide or as markdown directly from the GitHub repo.

Here are some SQL programming guidelines and best practices we collected:

• Do not use SELECT * in your queries.
• Always use table aliases when your SQL statement involves more than one source.
• Use the more readable ANSI-Standard Join clauses instead of the old style joins.
• Do not use column numbers in the ORDER BY clause.
• Always use a column list in your INSERT statements.
• Don't ever use double quotes in your T-SQL code.
• Do not prefix your stored procedure names with “sp_”.
• Always use a SQL formatter to format your SQL like Instant SQL Formatter (free and online)

You can check detailed explanation of those best practices in this blog post.

Two guides I know of are Joe Celko's SQL Programming Style and the venerable Code Complete.

There's also the SQL-92 standard. It doesn't contain a style section, but you might consider it's style to be implicitly canonical.