Re: Naming Convention for Columns

In article <01bd4b10$21e41e80$7387d9cf@rana>, "Alvin Sylvain" <alvin@NO.JUNK> writes: > > The main problem in naming conventions this way (ie, using "shortcut" > names) is coming up with unambiguous shortcuts for everything (because > the guy who came up with the idea is fairly lazy when it comes to > typing) > vs. words that are "long-enough-for-any-idiot-to-understand." > > What you have to do, and what we did, was create a "glossary" of > "company accepted" shortcuts. Naturally, the only person who read > and followed this glossary was the guy who wrote it. (I mean, come > ON, already: changing a perfectly understandable "FLAG" to cryptic > "FLG" in order save one character? Is it "DT" or "DTE" or "DAT" > instead of "DATE"? All this confustion just to follow this > "consistency" bug-a-boo?) > > So, in other words, in order to follow this new naming convention, > we all had to learn a new "vocabulary." On top of all the other crap > we had to learn (we were proficient in Sybase, but the customer wanted > Oracle). > > My personal preference is for self-documenting variables, including > table and column names, using shortcuts only where necessary. Of > course, you still have the problem with ambiguous and multiple full > spellings of words, but I think that problem isn't anywhere near as > severe as that of the utter *reams* of possible shortcuts for words! > I agree, but want to point out that long descriptive names have analogous problems -- e.g., is it "Account_Last_Updater_Name_ID" or "Account_Last_Updater_IDname"; "Credit_Account_Number_Suffix" or "Credit_Party_Identifier_Suffix", etc. In some ways the old-time naming restrictions (e.g., eight bytes for a variable) imposed a disipline -- you made sure you read and wrote them correctly!