Be it running reports or displaying data in some other visualization, SQL SELECT column expressions should be meaningful and understandable. To provide those valuable query results, SQL Developers, use a multitude of available functions, adjacent columns, or other means not readily apparent to end-users. All that being said, the column names often suffer the most as far as readability is concerned, taking on long function call names or other combined expressions. But, as luck would be on our side, there is an easy fix and that is aliasing columns using the AS keyword. Although AS is optional – in this particular context – I err on the side of readability and use it when aliasing SELECT column expressions.