Re: Naming conventions?

On Sun, 02 Jun 2002 17:22:41 GMT, "Tintin" <nospam_at_nospam.com> wrote:

>Does anyone have a good naming convention for table, columns, indexes, etc.
>that I can use? From what I see, I don't think Oracle has one. I tried to
>make up my own, but came across some problems.
>
>Thank you.
>
>~ !T
>

One convention we use and which helps a lot in writing understandable SQL, especially when you deal with a lot of joins, is:

• Each table has a unique three character long abreviation (for example: emp for employee ;-)
• Each column of a table is prefixed with the specific abreviation and underscore
• Foreign keys are the column_name in the parent table prefixed with the child table's prefix

(Some may argue, that schema_name.table_name.column_name is a unique identifier per database, but 98% of your SQL will happen inside one schema and I hate aliasing everything.)

=>

CREATE TABLE employee

(emp_id NUMBER(35),
 emp_dpt_id NUMBER(35),
 emp_name VARCHAR2(4000),
 emp_birthdate DATE,
 emp_hiredate DATE)

Marc Blum
mailto:marc_at_marcblum.de
http://www.marcblum.de Received on Sun Jun 02 2002 - 15:45:33 CDT