Database Table and Column Naming Conventions

Question

Whenever I design a database  I always wonder if there is a best way of naming an item in my database  Quite often I ask myself the following questions    Should table names be plural  Should column names be singular  Should I prefix tables or columns  Should I use any case in naming items    Are there any recommended guidelines out there for naming items in a database

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Table names should always be singular  because they represent a set of objects  As you say herd to designate a group of sheep  or flock do designate a group of birds  No need for plural  When a table name is composition of two names and naming convention is in plural it becomes hard to know if the plural name should be the first word or second word or both  It   s the logic     Object instance  not objects instance  Or TableName column  not TableNames column s   Microsoft SQL is not case sensitive  it   s easier to read table names  if upper case letters are used  to separate table or column names when they are composed of two or more names

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Table Name  It should be singular  as it is a singular entity representing a real world object and not objects  which is singlular   Column Name  It should be singular only then it conveys that it will hold an atomic value and will confirm to the normalization theory  If however  there are n number of same type of properties  then they should be suffixed with 1  2       n  etc    Prefixing Tables   Columns  It is a huge topic  will discuss later   Casing  It should be Camel case  My friend  Patrick Karcher  I request you to please not write anything which may be offensive to somebody  as you wrote      Further  foreign keys must be named consistently in different tables  It should be legal to beat up someone who does not do this    I have never done this mistake my friend Patrick  but I am writing generally  What if they together plan to beat you for this

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Late answer here  but in short   Plural table names  My preference is plural Singular column names  Yes Prefix tables or columns    Tables   Usually  no prefixes is best  Columns  No    Use any case in naming items  PascalCase for both tables and columns   Elaboration   1  What you must do   There are very few things that you must do a certain way  every time  but there are a few   Name your primary keys using  quot  singularOfTableName ID quot  format   That is  whether your table name is Customer or Customers  the primary key should be CustomerID  Further  foreign keys must be named consistently in different tables   It should be legal to beat up someone who does not do this   I would submit that while defined foreign key constraints are often important  consistent foreign key naming is always important You database must have internal conventions   Even though in later sections you ll see me being very flexible  within a database naming must be very consistent    Whether your table for customers is called Customers or Customer is less important than that you do it the same way throughout the same database   And you can flip a coin to determine how to use underscores  but then you must keep using them the same way   If you don t do this  you are a bad person who should have low self-esteem    2  What you should probably do   Fields representing the same kind of data on different tables should be named the same   Don t have Zip on one table and ZipCode on another  To separate words in your table or column names  use PascalCasing   Using camelCasing would not be intrinsically problematic  but that s not the convention and it would look funny   I ll address underscores in a moment    You may not use ALLCAPS as in the olden days   OBNOXIOUSTABLE ANNOYING COLUMN was okay in DB2 20 years ago  but not now   Don t artifically shorten or abbreviate words   It is better for a name to be long and clear than short and confusing   Ultra-short names is a holdover from darker  more savage times   Cus AddRef   What on earth is that   Custodial Addressee Reference   Customer Additional Refund   Custom Address Referral    3  What you should consider   I really think you should have plural names for tables  some think singular   Read the arguments elsewhere   Column names should be singular however   Even if you use plural table names  tables that represent combinations of other tables might be in the singular   For example  if you have a Promotions and an Items table  a table representing an item being a part of a promotion could be Promotions Items  but it could also legitimately be Promotion Items I think  reflecting the one-to-many relationship   Use underscores consistently and for a particular purpose   Just general tables names should be clear enough with PascalCasing  you don t need underscores to separate words   Save underscores either  a  to indicate an associative table or  b  for prefixing  which I ll address in the next bullet  Prefixing is neither good or bad   It usually is not best   In your first db or two  I would not suggest using prefixes for general thematic grouping of tables   Tables end up not fitting your categories easily  and it can actually make it harder to find tables   With experience  you can plan and apply a prefixing scheme that does more good than harm   I worked in a db once where data tables began with tbl  config tables with ctbl  views with vew  proc s sp  and udf s fn  and a few others  it was meticulously  consistently applied so it worked out okay   The only time you NEED prefixes is when you have really separate solutions that for some reason reside in the same db  prefixing them can be very helpful in grouping the tables   Prefixing is also okay for special situations  like for temporary tables that you want to stand out  Very seldom  if ever  would you want to prefix columns

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Table names singular  Let s say you were modelling a realtionship between someone and their address  For example  if you are reading a datamodel would you prefer   each person may live at 0 1 or many address   or  each people may live at 0 1 or many addresses   I think its easier to pluralise address  rather than have to rephrase people as person  Plus collective nouns are quite often dissimlar to the singular version

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--Example SQL  CREATE TABLE D001 Students       StudentID INTEGER CONSTRAINT nnD001 STID NOT NULL      ChristianName NVARCHAR 255  CONSTRAINT nnD001 CHNA NOT NULL      Surname NVARCHAR 255  CONSTRAINT nnD001 SURN NOT NULL      CONSTRAINT pkD001 PRIMARY KEY StudentID      CREATE INDEX idxD001 STID on D001 Students   CREATE TABLE D002 Classes       ClassID INTEGER CONSTRAINT nnD002 CLID NOT NULL      StudentID INTEGER CONSTRAINT nnD002 STID NOT NULL      ClassName NVARCHAR 255  CONSTRAINT nnD002 CLNA NOT NULL      CONSTRAINT pkD001 PRIMARY KEY ClassID  StudentID       CONSTRAINT fkD001 STID FOREIGN KEY StudentID           REFERENCES D001 Students StudentID      CREATE INDEX idxD002 CLID on D002 Classes   CREATE VIEW V001 StudentClasses       SELECT         D001 ChristianName          D001 Surname          D002 ClassName     FROM         D001 Students D001             INNER JOIN         D002 Classes D002             ON         D001 StudentID   D002 StudentID      These are the conventions I was taught  but you should adapt to whatever you developement hose uses    Plural  It is a collection of entities  Yes  The attribute is a representation of singular property of an entity  Yes  prefix table name allows easily trackable naming of all constraints indexes and table aliases  Pascal Case for table and column names  prefix   ALL caps for indexes and constraints

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Here s a link that offers a few choices   I was searching for a simple spec I could follow rather than having to rely on a partially defined one   http   justinsomnia org writings naming conventions html

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Very late to the party but I still wanted to add my two cents about column prefixes  There seem to be two main arguments for using the table column  or tableColumn  naming standard for columns  both based on the fact that the column name itself will be unique across your whole database   1  You do not have to specify table names and or column aliases in your queries all the time  2  You can easily search your whole code for the column name  I think both arguments are flawed  The solution for both problems without using prefixes is easy  Here s my proposal   Always use the table name in your SQL  E g   always use table column instead of column   It obviously solves 2  as you can now just search for table column instead of table column     But I can hear you scream  how does it solve 1   It was exactly about avoiding this  Yes  it was  but the solution was horribly flawed  Why  Well  the prefix solution boils down to  To avoid having to specify table column when there s ambiguity  you name all your columns table column  But this means you will from now on ALWAYS have to write the column name every time you specify a column  But if you have to do that anyways  what s the benefit over always explicitly writing table column  Exactly  there is no benefit  it s the exact same number of characters to type   edit  yes  I am aware that naming the columns with the prefix enforces the correct usage whereas my approach relies on the programmers

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our preference    Should table names be plural  Never  The arguments for it being a collection make sense  but you never know what the table is going to contain  0 1 or many items   Plural rules make the naming unnecessarily complicated  1 House  2 houses  mouse vs mice  person vs people  and we haven t even looked at any other languages   Update person set property    value  acts on each person in the table  Select   from person where person name    Greg  returns a collection rowset of person rows  Should column names be singular  Usually  yes  except where you are breaking normalisation rules  Should I prefix tables or columns  Mostly a platform preference  We prefer to prefix columns with the table name  We don t prefix tables  but we do prefix views  v   and  stored procedures  sp  or f   function    That helps people who want to try to upday v person age which is actually a calculated field in a view  which can t be UPDATEd anyway    It is also a great way to avoid keyword collision  delivery from breaks  but delivery from does not    It does make the code more verbose  but often aids in readability   bob   new person   bob person name    Bob  bob person dob    1958-12-21      is very readable and explicit  This can get out of hand though   customer customer customer type id  indicates a relationship between customer and the customer type table  indicates the primary key on the customer type table  customer type id  and if you ever see  customer customer type id  whilst debugging a query  you know instantly where it is from  customer table    or where you have a M-M relationship between customer type and customer category  only certain types are available to certain categories   customer category customer type id      is a little     on the long side  Should I use any case in naming items  Yes - lower case      with underscores  These are very readable and cross platform  Together with 3 above it also makes sense   Most of these are preferences though  - As long as you are consistent  it should be predictable for anyone that has to read it

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I know this is late to the game  and the question has been answered very well already  but I want to offer my opinion on  3 regarding the prefixing of column names   All columns should be named with a prefix that is unique to the table they are defined in   E g  Given tables  customer  and  address   let s go with prefixes of  cust  and  addr   respectively   customer  would have  cust id    cust name   etc  in it   address  would have  addr id    addr cust id   FK back to customer    addr street   etc  in it   When I was first presented with this standard  I was dead-set against it  I hated the idea  I couldn t stand the idea of all that extra typing and redundancy  Now I ve had enough experience with it that I d never go back   The result of doing this is that all of the columns in your database schema are unique  There is one major benefit to this  which trumps all arguments against it  in my opinion  of course     You can search your entire code base and reliably find every line of code that touches a particular column   The benefit from  1 is incredibly huge  I can deprecate a column and know exactly what files need to be updated before the column can safely be removed from the schema  I can change the meaning of a column and know exactly what code needs to be refactored  Or I can simply tell if data from a column is even being used in a particular portion of the system  I can t count the number of times this has turned a potentially huge project into a simple one  nor the amount of hours we ve saved in development work   Another  relatively minor benefit to it is that you only have to use table-aliases when you do a self join   SELECT cust id  cust name  addr street  addr city  addr state     FROM customer         INNER JOIN address ON addr cust id   cust id     WHERE cust name LIKE  J

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I think the best answer to each of those questions would be given by you and your team   It s far more important to have a naming convention then how exactly the naming convention is   As there s no right answer to that  you should take some time  but not too much  and choose your own conventions and - here s the important part - stick to it   Of course it s good to seek some information about standards on that  which is what you re asking  but don t get anxious or worried about the number of different answers you might get   choose the one that seems better for you   Just in case  here are my answers    Yes   A table is a group of records  teachers or actors  so    plural  Yes  I don t use them  The database I use more often - Firebird - keeps everything in upper case  so it doesn t matter   Anyway  when I m programming I write the names in a way that it s easier to read  like releaseYear

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I work in a database support team with three DBAs and our considered options are    Any naming standard is better than no standard  There is no  one true  standard  we all have our preferences If there is standard already in place  use it  Don t create another standard or muddy the existing standards    We use singular names for tables   Tables tend to be prefixed with the name of the system  or its acronym    This is useful if the system complex as you can change the prefix to group the tables together logically  ie  reg customer  reg booking and regadmin limits    For fields we d expect field names to be include the prefix acryonm of the table  i e  cust address1  and we also prefer the use of a standard set of suffixes    id for the PK   cd for  code    nm for  name    nb for  number    dt for  Date     The name of the Foriegn key field should be the same as the Primary key field     i e    SELECT cust nm  cust add1  booking dt FROM reg customer INNER JOIN reg booking ON reg customer cust id   reg booking cust id   When developing a new project  I d recommend you write out all the preferred entity names  prefixes and acronyms and give this document to your developers   Then  when they decide to create a new table  they can refer to the document rather than  guess  what the table and fields should be called

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Essential Database Naming Conventions  and Style   click here for more detailed description   table names choose short  unambiguous names  using no more than one or two words distinguish tables easily facilitates the naming of unique field names as well as lookup and linking tables give tables singular names  never plural  update  i still agree with the reasons given for this convention  but most people really like plural table names  so i   ve softened my stance     follow the link above please

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I m also in favour of a ISO IEC 11179 style naming convention  noting they are guidelines rather than being prescriptive   See Data element name on Wikipedia    Tables are Collections of Entities  and follow Collection naming guidelines  Ideally  a collective name is used  eg   Personnel  Plural is also correct  Employees  Incorrect names include  Employee  tblEmployee  and EmployeeTable    As always  there are exceptions to rules e g  a table which always has exactly one row may be better with a singular name e g  a config table  And consistency is of utmost importance  check whether you shop has a convention and  if so  follow it  if you don t like it then do a business case to have it changed rather than being the lone ranger

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Definitely keep table names singular  person not people   Same here No  I ve seen some terrible prefixes  going so far as to state what were dealing with is a table  tbl   or a user store procedure  usp    This followed by the database name    Don t do it   Yes  I tend to PascalCase all my table names

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My opinions on these are   1  No  table names should be singular   While it appears to make sense for the simple selection  select   from Orders  it makes less sense for the OO equivalent  Orders x   new Orders    A table in a DB is really the set of that entity  it makes more sense once you re using set-logic   select Orders   from Orders inner join Products     on Orders Key   Products Key   That last line  the actual logic of the join  looks confusing with plural table names   I m not sure about always using an alias  as Matt suggests  clears that up   2  They should be singular as they only hold 1 property  3  Never  if the column name is ambiguous  as above where they both have a column called  Key   the name of the table  or its alias  can distinguish them well enough  You want queries to be quick to type and simple - prefixes add unnecessary complexity   4  Whatever you want  I d suggest CapitalCase  I don t think there s one set of absolute guidelines on any of these     As long as whatever you pick is consistent across the application or DB I don t think it really matters

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I hear the argument all the time that whether or not a table is pluralized is all a matter of personal taste and there is no best practice   I don t believe that is true  especially as a programmer as opposed to a DBA   As far as I am aware  there are no legitimate reasons to pluralize a table name other than  It just makes sense to me because it s a collection of objects   while there are legitimate gains in code by having singular table names   For example    It avoids bugs and mistakes caused by plural ambiguities   Programmers aren t exactly known for their spelling expertise  and pluralizing some words are confusing   For example  does the plural word end in  es  or just  s    Is it persons or people   When you work on a project with large teams  this can become an issue   For example  an instance where a team member uses the incorrect method to pluralize a table he creates   By the time I interact with this table  it is used all over in code I don t have access to or would take too long to fix   The result is I have to remember to spell the table wrong every time I use it  Something very similar to this happened to me   The easier you can make it for every member of the team to consistently and easily use the exact  correct table names without errors or having to look up table names all the time  the better  The singular version is much easier to handle in a team environment  If you use the singular version of a table name AND prefix the primary key with the table name  you now have the advantage of easily determining a table name from a primary key or vice versa via code alone   You can be given a variable with a table name in it  concatenate  Id  to the end  and you now have the primary key of the table via code  without having to do an additional query   Or you can cut off  Id  from the end of a primary key to determine a table name via code   If you use  id  without a table name for the primary key  then you cannot via code determine the table name from the primary key   In addition  most people who pluralize table names and prefix PK columns with the table name use the singular version of the table name in the PK  for example statuses and status id   making it impossible to do this at all  If you make table names singular  you can have them match the class names they represent   Once again  this can simplify code and allow you to do really neat things  like instantiating a class by having nothing but the table name   It also just makes your code more consistent  which leads to    If you make the table name singular  it makes your naming scheme consistent  organized  and easy to maintain in every location   You know that in every instance in your code  whether it s in a column name  as a class name  or as the table name  it s the same exact name   This allows you to do global searches to see everywhere that data is used   When you pluralize a table name  there will be cases where you will use the singular version of that table name  the class it turns into  in the primary key    It just makes sense to not have some instances where your data is referred to as plural and some instances singular    To sum it up  if you pluralize your table names you are losing all sorts of advantages in making your code smarter and easier to handle   There may even be cases where you have to have lookup tables arrays to convert your table names to object or local code names you could have avoided   Singular table names  though perhaps feeling a little weird at first  offer significant advantages over pluralized names and I believe are best practice

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Naming conventions allow the development team to design discovereability and maintainability at the heart of the project    A good naming convention takes time to evolve but once it   s in place it allows the team to move forward with a common language  A good naming convention grows organically with the project  A good naming convention easily copes with changes during the longest and most important phase of the software lifecycle - service management in production   Here are my answers    Yes  table names should be plural when they refer to a set of trades  securities  or counterparties for example  Yes  Yes  SQL tables are prefixed with tb   views are prefixed vw   stored procedures are prefixed usp  and triggers are prefixed tg  followed by the database name  Column name should be lower case separated by underscore     Naming is hard but in every organisation there is someone who can name things and in every software team there should be someone who takes responsibility for namings standards and ensures that naming issues like sec id  sec value and security id get resolved early before they get baked into the project   So what are the basic tenets of a good naming convention and standards  -   Use the language of your client and your solution domain Be descriptive Be consistent Disambiguate  reflect and refactor Don   t use abbreviations unless they are clear to everyone Don   t use SQL reserved keywords as column names

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Take a look at ISO 11179-5  Naming and identification principles You can get it here  http   metadata-standards org 11179  11179-5  I blogged about it a while back here  ISO-11179 Naming Conventions

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SELECT     UserID  FirstName  MiddleInitial  LastName FROM Users ORDER BY LastName

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Ok  since we re weighing in with opinion   I believe that table names should be plural  Tables are a collection  a table  of entities  Each row represents a single entity  and the table represents the collection  So I would call a table of Person entities People  or Persons  whatever takes your fancy    For those who like to see singular  entity names  in queries  that s what I would use table aliases for   SELECT person Name FROM People person   A bit like LINQ s  from person in people select person Name    As for 2  3 and 4  I agree with  Lars

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In my opinion    Table names should be plural  Column names should be singular  No  Either CamelCase  my preferred  or underscore separated for both table names and column names    However  like it has been mentioned  any convention is better than no convention  No matter how you choose to do it  document it so that future modifications follow the same conventions

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I recommend checking out Microsoft s SQL Server sample databases  https   github com Microsoft sql-server-samples releases tag adventureworks  The AdventureWorks sample uses a very clear and consistent naming convention that uses schema names for the organization of database objects    Singular names for tables Singular names for columns Schema name for tables prefix  E g   SchemeName TableName  Pascal casing  a k a  upper camel case

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No  A table should be named after the entity it represents  Person  not persons is how you would refer to whoever one of the records represents  Again  same thing  The column FirstName really should not be called FirstNames  It all depends on what you want to represent with the column  NO  Yes  Case it for clarity  If you need to have columns like  FirstName   casing will make it easier to read    Ok  Thats my  0 02

[database] Database, Table and Column Naming Conventions?

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