While 'tags' are fine for objects like forms, reports modules etc I'm very
much against their use for table and column names. The convention for these
used by most SQL programmers of my acquaintance is to use plural or
collective nouns for tables, using terms which as closely as possible
represent the entity type which the table is modelling, e.g. Employees,
Orders etc. For column names singular nouns are generally used, again using
terms which as closely as possible describe the attribute which the column
represents, e.g. firstname, lastname orderdate. As you see the convention
here is to use lower case for column names, though personally I don't see any
real advantage in that and I tend to use CamelCase (not camelCase, note).

By keeping as close as possible to real English words it makes writing and
reading SQL a lot easier. I was told by Joe Celko once that some
psychometric research on this had actually been done at one American
university, which demonstrated the advantages of this approach. One thing I
do know from experience is that it’s a real PITA when I receive databases to
work on where naming conventions of Byzantine complexity have been used for
table and column names.

Ken Sheridan
Stafford, England

"Mell via AccessMonster.com" wrote:

I have been told that if you don't name your tables, queries, forms & reports
like below than you did not build the db properly? Do these abbreviations
have to be put in front of the name to be policitally correct as a good
developer?


1. TABLES: tbl
2. QUERIES: qdf
3. FORMS: frm
4. REPORTS: rpt

Any suggestions would be greatly appreicated.

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