Field notes from building these tools: formatter edge cases we found by testing real queries, the trade-offs behind data-format conversion, and engineering write-ups.
What we found running real PostgreSQL, T-SQL, MySQL, Oracle and BigQuery queries through sql-formatter while writing this site’s dialect pages — with the actual output and a workaround for each case.
Read the articleXML has attributes, ordered mixed content and no notion of arrays; JSON has none of those problems and none of those features. Four questions every XML-to-JSON converter has to answer, and the trade-offs behind each answer.
Read the articleBrowsers ship a complete XPath engine, and this site’s XPath tester does not use it. The constraint that forced a hand-written evaluator, what it deliberately leaves out, and the two spec details it got wrong first.
Read the article