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Category: Naming

Naming Conventions for Power BI Semantic Models

Published 2026-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Ruben Van de Voorde gets organized:

Naming conventions for your semantic model should be a high priority for any developer. It’s incredibly important not just to ensure your model is organized and professional for developers and users, but also when using AI agents to query or manage it. Without clear naming conventions, people and agents waste time and are more likely to make mistakes.

Click through for a sensible scheme. In the meantime, I’ll provide the joke I normally use around naming. I love naming conventions. In fact, I love them so much, I have five of them and switch interchangeable between them as I develop.

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Choosing Names in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic asks, what’s in a name?

My dear Microsoft Fabric friends – if you’ve ever opened a workspace and seen “Lakehouse”, “Lakehouse 1”, “lh_test_v2”, and “NewLakehouse_DELETE_ME” all sitting next to each other, this post is for you

Three weeks into a fresh Fabric tenant, things look great. Twelve weeks in, you’re staring at 47 workspaces, three of them called something like “Test – DO NOT USE”, and nobody on the team can remember which Lakehouse holds the actual production sales data.

I don’t know how Nikola has figured out my naming strategy so well. Click through for a systematic attempt to standardize naming for Fabric objects.

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Word Order and Constraint Naming

Published 2026-04-07 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Levy is looking for a name:

Ten years (and a couple jobs) ago, I wrote about naming default constraints to avoid having SQL Server name them for you. I closed with the following statement:

SQL Server needs a name for the constraint regardless; it’s worth specifying it yourself.

We’re back with a new wrinkle in the story.

Read on for an interesting scenario where Andy very clearly named a constraint, yet the name didn’t take.

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The Power of Naming Standards

Published 2026-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson covers naming standards:

I am starting a new, huge project soon, using some different tools than I have used before. So the first thing we need to do in this project is to come up with new standards for these new tools, right? No.

Understanding the overall scope and desired results, requirements are first, then a high-level design and architecture plan including what tools one expects to use.

Standards however, are something that you should be in place before you start creating stuff.

I like naming standards a lot. I like them so much, I have a half-dozen of them and use them all at once.

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Using a Naming Convention for Microsoft Fabric Items

Published 2025-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld asks, what’s in a name?

In Fabric, you can have many different items in your Workspace. So many, that you easily get lost! Luckily there are tools at hand like Taskflows and Workspace folders. But still, it can be challenging to easily find all your items that ingest data, or find all items that are used for inbetween layers to transform data.

In this blog, I will tell you more about my personal best practice for naming convention of Fabric items that helps me to structure everything in my workspace.

This kind of thing typically doesn’t matter much when you only have a dozen or so items in your workspace. But as that number increases and different teams are working on different sets of items, it gets harder to figure out what’s going on without a proper naming convention.

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Renaming a Database in SQL Server

Published 2024-11-14 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones asks, what’s in a name?:

I had someone ask me how to rename a SQL Server database recently. They were doing some development work and wanted to rename databases to test an application. I thought I remembered, but in this post, I show I learned something.

Read on for the answer, as well as some notes about it. One additional thing I’d point out is that renaming the database doesn’t rename the underlying files.

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Renaming Factor Levels in R

Published 2024-03-06 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson renames factor levels of a categorical variable:

Before we jump into renaming factor levels, let’s quickly recap what factors are and why they’re useful. Factors are used to represent categorical data in R. They store both the values of the categorical variables and their corresponding levels. Each level represents a unique category within the variable.

Click through for three methods you can use to pull this off.

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