Category: Naming

Ed Elliott kicks a hornet’s nest:

There is a lot of confusion when it comes to designing tables in SQL Server around whether to pluralize names or not. How do you choose whether to pluralize or not?

If we want to store a list of people and their details do we use “Person”, “Persons”, “People” or “Peoples”? Some people will use “People” and some will use “Person”, other persons or people would go for “Peoples” or “Persons”.

My preference is singular. In the event that I do pluralize a table, I use a grammatically correct pluralization. None of this “childs” nonsense.

Kendra Little explains why hard-coding database names in your stored procedures or views is a bad idea:

I’m terrible at naming things. I recently wrote some quick code to reproduce a design problem and demonstrate several options for solutions, and later realized that I’d named my objects dbo.Foo, dbo.FooFoo, and dbo.Wat.

But I feel strongly about a few important principles about referring to objects that are already named in a relational database, specifically SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Most of the time, you should use a two part-name for objects in the current database. It’s important to know your database context. When referencing an object in the current database, you should not specify the database name in the reference.

Read the comments as well. I’m not as hard-set against three-part naming for cross-database queries but can understand the sentiment.

Phil Factor explains naming requirements for SQL Server and gives suggestions for conventions to follow:

There are no generally accepted standards for naming SQL objects. Although ISO/IEC 11179 has been referred to as a standard for naming, it actually only sets a standard for defining naming conventions. There is a sample standard in the ‘Naming principles’ document (ISO/IEC 11179-5), but this is merely an example of how a standard should be defined. However, it is quite close to a general good-practice in programming.

When naming a table, it is a good idea to use a collective name or ‘object class term’ for the entity if one exists ( such as Employee, Cost, Tree, component, member, audience, staff or faculty) but use the singular rather than the plural form where possible. For the sake of maintenance, use a consistent naming convention that is informative but brief. It helps greatly to start with a dictionary of the correct nouns and verbs associated with the application domain and use that. If it proves inadequate, then the team can build on it. If a data model has been created as part of the design phase, this dictionary should be an end-product of this work.

As Phil notes at the end, consistency is the most important virtue here. It’s hard to work with a database where you have tables named Employees, employee_dates, and tblFiredEmployee.

Tim Mitchell calls out some bad naming practices:

Spaces in object names. The bane of my existence. Most relational databases will allow you to use spaces in object names, requiring anyone accessing that object to put brackets around the name. My rule of thumb is that if it’s something that I will interact with programmatically, it doesn’t get a space in the name. Spaces in object names tend to break things, so please stop doing this.

My favorite naming convention oddity is the idea that if something has “Number” in the name, it’s never a number.

Lori Brown shows us a few methods for finding references to tables:

I use sys.sql_modules to check for references to strings in stored procedures. You might think that this would not be necessary since you can find that in sys.dm_sql_referencing_entities for those. However, what if you do a lot of stuff in stored procedures that uses dynamic SQL to create objects or other stored procs on the fly? sys.dm_sql_referencing_entities might miss those. For example, when I look in sys.sql_modules for all occurrences of Sales.Orders I find more.

This is necessarily an incomplete list, but at least it gets you started.