Re: Naming Standards

Dale Forrey wrote: > > We are new to the Informix world and the Data Administrator at our > shop is a little frustrated with the 18 character limit on names. Has > anyone come up with a clever set of naming standards that they are willing > to share with the list? For instance, do element names always or ever > reference the entity to which they belong? Is there a standard set of > abbreviations that you use? Are some words always abbreviated and others > never abbreviated? Where did Informix come up with a limit of 18 characters > in the first place? Anyway, thanks for your help. A philosophy question? ;-) Dale, while I agree that 18 characters can be a bit confining, it's really not that bad. Consider your programming effort if your column names were 30 characters each, like you probably want. Only a COBOL programmer could really want to code that way. Your variables declared LIKE these column would take up half of each line of code! (I'm in an environment now where the historical convention is that all table names are 6 characters plus a 2-char prefix.) IMO it's an option we would all like to have sometimes but would seldom use in practice. If your needs are simple, you may wish to prefix each column name with some abbreviated table name. It is guaranteed to avoid ambiguity in primary-key to foreign-key match ups. For a more complex database, where you want to avoid ambiguity even more, those extra few prefix characters begin to leech precious positions from your clear column names. But let it leech and name your tables explicitly to avoid ambiguity, because you and your programmers will curse you a lot for each column whose purpose is obfuscated by a short name. -- -- Jake (Lost in thought and won't ask for directions) . . _..-'( )`-.._ ./'. '||\\\\. }\\_/{ .//||` .`\\. ./'.|'.'||||\\\\|.. )o o( ..|//||||`.`|.`\\. ./'..|'.|| |||||\\`````` \\,@,/ ''''''/||||| ||.`|..`\\. ./'.||'.|||| ||||||||||||. ||| .|||||||||||| ||||.`||.`\\. /'|||'.|||||| ||||||||||||{ | }|||||||||||| ||||||.`|||`\\ '.|||'.||||||| ||||||||||||{ | }|||||||||||| |||||||.`|||.` '.||| ||||||||| |/' ``\\||`` | ''||/'' `\\| ||||||||| |||.` |/' \\./' `\\./ \\!|\\ /|!/ \\./' `\\./ `\\| V V V }' `\\ /' `{ V V V \\ \\ \\ V / / / +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Impeccable Logic: A thought process which successfully | | resists chicken bites | +-----------------------------------------------------------+