SQL Formatter With Lowercase Keywords

Uppercasing SQL keywords dates back to an era when code editors had no syntax highlighting at all, and visually distinguishing `SELECT` and `WHERE` from the table and column names surrounding them required manually typing them in a different case — it was a substitute for the colour-coding a modern editor now provides automatically. With every mainstream editor and IDE now highlighting SQL keywords by colour regardless of how they are typed, that original justification has largely disappeared, and a number of modern style guides have moved to recommending lowercase throughout for a simpler reason: it is faster to type and does not require switching mental gears between cases while writing a query.

The correct case convention for keywords is ultimately whatever a given project's existing codebase or team style guide already uses, not an objectively correct choice — the actual behaviour of the query is identical either way. This preset exists for exactly the teams and individuals who have already settled on lowercase, so a formatted query matches the prevailing style of the surrounding codebase rather than introducing a jarring, differently-cased query into a file where every other query is lowercase.

The actual cost of mixed keyword casing within one codebase is not technical — SQL does not care — it is the small, cumulative friction of a reviewer's attention snagging on an inconsistency every time they read a query, which adds up across a team reviewing dozens of queries a week. Picking one convention, lowercase or uppercase, and applying it uniformly is what actually delivers the readability benefit; this preset makes lowercase the mechanical default so nobody has to manually retype keywords to match a team's chosen style.