Your Opinion on Design Question

Michael Gramelspacher wrote in
:

On 25 Nov 2008 00:46:00 GMT, "David W. Fenton"
wrote:

Michael Gramelspacher wrote in
m:

If Steve were to drop the TblVendor nonsense and just name the
table Vendors, if would be a giant step in conveying the idea
that he is truly a competent database professional.

That's a completely unwarranted assumption, and, I think, says
more about the baggage you're carrying into the discussion than it
does about the merit of any particular answer to the question
itself.

In the Access development world, it is standard practice, and to
me, an Access developer who *doesn't* use it is the one who looks
unprofessional. There are very good reasons for it in Access that
derive in part from the application development environment and
the way it presents information (and combines multiple namespaces
in certain contexts).

Now, I don't mean to imply that Tony is unprofessional -- he's
obviously not, but his naming conventions always struck me as a
quirk particular to *him*.

And I think he's the bees knees despite it.

Yes, you are probably correct about the baggage. Been reading too
much of Celko,

Celko is a moron. He keeps making the same arguments from theory
over and over again and is never wrong about anything. According to
himself, of course. I killfiled him a long time ago as his
contributions were always way too impractical in most cases to be
helpful. His dogmatic approach to all sorts of db issues always
struck me as completely counterproductive in real-world situations.

too much time
perusing the sqlserver.programming newsgroup,

Yet another place where a lot of people who've read a lot of books
expound on real-world programming problems without any experience
that allows them to offer real solutions.

too much pondering the Microsoft templates for Access
2003.

The Access templates are *filled* with *terrible* practices and I
recommend enormous caution in modelling any app on them without
major revisions.

Ten years of casual use of Access and following the Access
newsgroups and reading Access books, and ten years of seeing the
tbl- prefix propagated upon wave after wave of new Access users.
Sure, I know the reason. Because it is just the right thing to
use for Access tables. How else can a person know whether Vendors
is a table or a query?

That's not actually the justification I use in my own work.

It is just a matter of style. We can leave it at that.

So, in other words, you're retracting your previous assertion. Good
to know.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/

"John... Visio MVP" wrote in
:

I always consider tables to be collections of
items and so use a plural name for a table. To access the table,
the PK points to a record (a single item), so I would use the
singular for the PK. So a table called People would have a PK of
PersonId. I tend towards to the proper English terms rather than
Entity names. Find Customer in Customers
rather than
Find pkCustomerId in tblCustomer

But that's not what anyone is advocating, so you're just disagreeing
with a strawman.

Not terribly useful.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/

"Steve" wrote:

If you are such a "truly competent database professional", answer this:
Vendor appears in some VBA code, is Vendor a table or query?

Why does it matter?

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Please respond only in the newsgroups so that others can
read the entire thread of messages.
Microsoft Access Links, Hints, Tips & Accounting Systems at
http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/

Michael Gramelspacher wrote:

Ten years of casual use of Access and following the Access newsgroups and reading Access books, and
ten years of seeing the tbl- prefix propagated upon wave after wave of new Access users. Sure, I
know the reason. Because it is just the right thing to use for Access tables.

But why is using tbl a prefix the right thing?

How else can a person
know whether Vendors is a table or a query?

What does it matter? No difference between a table or query other
than some queries aren't updatable.

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Please respond only in the newsgroups so that others can
read the entire thread of messages.
Microsoft Access Links, Hints, Tips & Accounting Systems at
http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/

"Larry Daugherty" wrote:

Are you now going to jump in and object to every response with object
prefixes embedded?

Not at all. Just that if someone is going to start off designing a
system I wanted to point out some alternatives.

In this case,
it's far removed from the issue..

Sure but I reserve the right to comment as I fee like. smile

Shall we who embrace the Reddick naming convention jump on each of
your posts and make a big deal out of the fact that you *don't support
the most widely adopted naming convention for Access, VB and VBA*? We
would be equally justified. More so, I believe. The more widely
adopted the naming convention, the greater its value.

However I feel the naming conventions are a hindrance and are of very
little value. With the exception of VBA variables where I generally
do use them.

Too bad that your eagerness to refer to your own practices on your
site caused you to single out a post of Steve's. Others then piled
on. I don't know if you've been aware but his behavior has improved a
whole bunch over what it was in years past. He has been doing a lot
more responsible posting without the constant hustle of the unwary.

I hadn't even realized it was Steve Santos as it wasn't his usual
posting of paid help. I seldom read the names unless they stand out
and/or have last names I recognize as a regular.

Steve has been soliciting some lately though.

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Please respond only in the newsgroups so that others can
read the entire thread of messages.
Microsoft Access Links, Hints, Tips & Accounting Systems at
http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/

"Larry Daugherty" wrote:

Are you now going to jump in and object to every response with object
prefixes embedded?

Oh, and no. I generally don't answer too many questions in the
tablesdbdesign newsgroup. I just look for interesting subjects. And
I have no idea how I define interesting. smile

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Please respond only in the newsgroups so that others can
read the entire thread of messages.
Microsoft Access Links, Hints, Tips & Accounting Systems at
http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/

On Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:53:07 -0700, "Tony Toews [MVP]" wrote:

Michael Gramelspacher wrote:

Ten years of casual use of Access and following the Access newsgroups and reading Access books, and
ten years of seeing the tbl- prefix propagated upon wave after wave of new Access users. Sure, I
know the reason. Because it is just the right thing to use for Access tables.

But why is using tbl a prefix the right thing?

How else can a person
know whether Vendors is a table or a query?

What does it matter? No difference between a table or query other
than some queries aren't updatable.

Tony

I did not mean for that to be taken seriously. I view using a prefix for tables as perhaps an
addiction. I had the addiction too once. At some point I was asked why I did that, and all I knew
to answer was that everyone else did it.

Here is a site with 100s of data models. I have seen people referred to the site from Access and
Sqlserver newsgroups. I do not think you will see and tbl- prefixes there.
http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/index.htm

And, of course, how about Northwind?