Perhaps this is a stupid question but we've had some debate recently.
Which of the two (semantically equivalent) ways is preferable to test for inequality:
- 'foo' != 'bar'
- 'foo' <> 'bar'
The mysql documentation clearly indicates that there is no difference between them and yet some people seem to be attached to only doing it one way or the other. Maybe this is just another pointless vi vs. emacs debate but when other people are reading your code (and therefore your queries), its useful to maintain some consistency.
One interesting element to the debate is that <> looks a lot like <=> which is a very underused operator but could perhaps lead to confusion at a quick glance since the two are nearly opposite (except for the obvious NULL cases).