How do you name table/structure elements?

[Jon]

sullivan at aqdata.uucp (Michael T. Sullivan) writes:

>I would like to get some feedback as to how and why you name your
>database table rows or C structure elements.  As far as I can tell,
>there are two camps:  the "plain descriptive" and the "table/structure
>descriptive".  Let me give an example:  supposed you have a
>table/structure called "customer".  Its elements can be named two ways

>        plain descriptive                 table/structure descriptive
>        -----------------                 ---------------------------
>        name                              cu_name
>        address                           cu_address
>        city                              cu_city
>        state                             cu_state
>        zip                               cu_zip
>                      ...and so on.

What you're calling the table/structure descriptive is a symptom of
impoverished namespace tools, or someone's exposure to the same in
previous work.  Query languages can name columns unambiguously using
classic structure.member syntax.  Nothing is added by the redundancy.
Consider:

	select cu_name from customer
	select * from customer, locations where cu_name = lo_name

Versus:

	select name from customer
	select * from customer c, locations l where c.name = l.name

Anyone see any advantage of the first form?

-- Jon
-- 
Jonathan Krueger    jkrueger at dtic.dla.mil   uunet!dgis!jkrueger
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