I was wondering peoples opinions on the naming of ID columns in database tables.
If I have a table called Invoices with a primary key of an identity column I would c
See the Interakt site's naming conventions for a well thought out system of naming tables and columns. The method makes use of a suffix for each table (_prd
for a product table, or _ctg
for a category table) and appends that to each column in a given table. So the identity column for the products table would be id_prd
and is therefore unique in the database.
They go one step further to help with understanding the foreign keys: The foreign key in the product table that refers to the category table would be idctg_prd
so that it is obvious to which table it belong (_prd
suffix) and to which table it refers (category).
Advantages are that there is no ambiguity with the identity columns in different tables, and that you can tell at a glance which columns a query is referring to by the column names.