You may not like this, but:

This is not a problem to be solved easily by additional technologies or tools.

An SQL which contains "long nested queries, sometimes calling other procedures" and cannot be easily understood should at least have proper indentation and comments. Otherwise, it will become an unmaintainable mess. So if it is really that hard to understand the query line-by-line, reject the change and ask the author for making it more readable.

And asking authors to explain their code during a review is not the worst thing , quite the opposite. You could both together go through the code and add the missing comments together.

Of course, the technological solution to this would be to avoid writing SQL queries at all and switch to something like an ORM which generates most queries automatically. But unfortunately, this is not a realistic solution for many real-world systems, since it could mean to rewrite large parts of the system new from the ground (and often ORMs introduce their own class of new problems).

You may not like this, but:

This is not a problem to be solved easily by additional technologies or tools.

An SQL which contains "long nested queries, sometimes calling other procedures" and cannot be easily understood should at least have proper indentation and comments. Otherwise, it will become an unmaintainable mess. So if it is really that hard to understand the query line-by-line, reject the change and ask the author for making it more readable.

And asking authors to explain their code during a review is not the worst thing , quite the opposite. You could both together go through the code and add the missing comments together.

Of course, the technological solution to this would be to avoid writing SQL queries at all and switch to something like an ORM which generates most queries automatically. But unfortunately, this is not a realistic solution for many real-world systems, since it could mean to rewrite large parts of the system new from the ground (and often ORMs introduce their own class of new problems, sometimes they introduce more problems than they solve).

This is not a problem to be solved by technologies or tools.

An SQL which contains "long nested queries, sometimes calling other procedures" and cannot be easily understood should at least have proper indentation and comments. Otherwise, it will become an unmaintainable mess. So if it is really that hard to understand the query line-by-line, reject the change and ask the author for making it more readable.

And asking authors to explain their code during a review is not the worst thing , quite the opposite. You could both together go through the code and add the missing comments together.

You may not like this, but:

This is not a problem to be solved easily by additional technologies or tools.

An SQL which contains "long nested queries, sometimes calling other procedures" and cannot be easily understood should at least have proper indentation and comments. Otherwise, it will become an unmaintainable mess. So if it is really that hard to understand the query line-by-line, reject the change and ask the author for making it more readable.

And asking authors to explain their code during a review is not the worst thing , quite the opposite. You could both together go through the code and add the missing comments together.

Of course, the technological solution to this would be to avoid writing SQL queries at all and switch to something like an ORM which generates most queries automatically. But unfortunately, this is not a realistic solution for many real-world systems, since it could mean to rewrite large parts of the system new from the ground (and often ORMs introduce their own class of new problems).