Improving code is like losing weight. First, you need to know what is good and what is bad. You need metrics and appropriate measurement tools to express your goals and achievements. Then you get results as a series of small steps in the right direction.

In PL/SQL and SQL, code complexity can be expressed in lines of code, number of statements, as McCabe's cyclomatic complexity, Halstead's volume, or the maintainability index. Reducing complexity is one way of improving code quality.

However, in this talk I will focus on coding guidelines for PL/SQL and SQL and discuss my favourite guidelines. These guidelines are actually rules and must be followed. Therefore, there is (almost) no room for different interpretations. So, if we violate any of these rules, it means our code is broken. I will show you how you can use the dbLinter extension for Visual Studio Code to find these bugs in your code and fix them manually or even automatically.

By the end of this session, you'll know how to check your code in Visual Studio Code and efficiently eliminate bad code.