Poor SQL vs SQLFluff

Poor SQL reformats and colorizes T-SQL according to settings such as indentation, tab spacing, maximum width, and where statements and clauses break. It can expand comma lists, boolean and CASE expressions, and JOIN ON sections. Formatting runs in the browser, including offline, and the site says submitted SQL is not sent to an external service. Output views include input SQL, formatted SQL, and HTML source. An obfuscation and minification option can vary colors, line lengths, and keyword case, or substitute keywords. Downloads include plugins for SQL Server Management Studio, Visual Studio, and WinMerge, plus a command-line bulk formatter. The open-source Poor Man’s T-SQL Formatter library is AGPL-licensed and supports Microsoft.NET and Mono; its JavaScript library works in browsers and contexts such as Node.js. The project describes its parsing as coarse rather than full, especially for DDL. The free plan is free. Settings are remembered with a cookie; blocking cookies restores defaults on each visit.

SQLFluff is an open-source, dialect-flexible SQL linter designed for ELT applications. It reports style and syntax issues, parses SQL without database access and can automatically fix many violations with one command. Documentation describes support for more than 25 dialects, including T-SQL, PostgreSQL, BigQuery and Snowflake, alongside more than 70 rules for style, structure and best practices. Jinja templating and dbt are supported, and CI/CD integration includes GitHub Actions output for pull-request annotations. SQLFluff is free under the MIT License and installs from PyPI with pip or another Python package manager. It does not execute SQL itself, but templating macros such as dbt's run_query may execute arbitrary SQL. The Jinja templater uses Jinja2 SandboxedEnvironment to limit unsafe code execution. The dbt templater requires the relevant adapter and sqlfluff-templater-dbt package; models accessing a database during compilation require database access. Community support includes documentation, GitHub, Slack and Stack Overflow.