Thanks for your reply.

In what ways does "Instant SQL Formatter" fall short?

Anyone know of a program which will take SQL code and format it nicely, which works with SQL written for Vertica?

I imagine there are some generic formatters but I'm not sure whether they'd leave the code intact.

Thanks, sKwa! You are teh awesome! Just for my own notes: vertica=> SELECT CAST(172 AS INTERVAL SECOND) - CAST(172::VARCHAR || ' s' AS INTERVAL) AS diff; diff ------ 0 (1 row) Kind of silly of me...I think I read the documention too zealously; they're very restrictive on what casts are allowed, even...

Right now I do this as Is there a less klunky way of doing it?

I have no, but book Sql Antipatterns does. OK...seems like what he didn't like about it was that it doesn't scale well. I'm only doing some spot-checking, so scaling isn't really a concern for me. May be this thread will interest you too: Selecting a Random Set of Rows from a Table I'll check that ...

How can one randomly pick rows from a table? A stackoverflow thread ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/580639/how-to-randomly-select-rows-in-sql ) suggests SELECT column FROM table ORDER BY RANDOM() LIMIT 1 in the case of one row, for PostgreSQL. The same code seems to work in Vertica, though I do...

sKwa wrote:And how about function overloading?

Yeah, that seems like a handy trick. I'll try that soon.