When you’re working with a database, it’s very hard to not deal with strings at some point in your journey. There are lots of different functions that you will be working with when you’re working with strings. Today, I want to go over some of the basic ones that you’ll use in Snowflake.
The first two that you’ll deal with make the string either upper or lowercase. Yes, that’s right – you’ve probably figured out the names of the functions already. UPPER() and LOWER() are the 2 functions respectively.
Kevin mentions title capitalization (though not by name) and the quick rule depends on which rulebook you’re using. I grew up with MLA, which I summarize as:
- Don’t capitalize articles (the, a, an), prepositions, or coordinating conjunctions (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so)
- Don’t capitalize “to” when it’s an infinitive (to go, to drive, etc.)
- Don’t capitalize the second part of a hyphenated phrase if it shows up in the dictionary as one word without a hyphen
- Capitalize everything else
And a quick bit of advice: understanding title capitalization really does make you look more professional, I promise. Unless we’re using different rulebooks, in which case at least one of us is a heretic.