Underscores or camelCase in PostgreSQL identifiers, when the programming language uses camelCase?

Question

This has been bothering me for a while, and I can\'t arrive at a solution that feels right...

Given an OO language in which the usual naming convention for object

Answer 1

If your columns in the PostgreSQL are with underscores, you can put aliases but with doule-quotes.

Example :

SELECT my_column as "myColumn" from table;

Answer 2

Given that PostgreSQL uses case-insensitive identifiers with underscores, should you change all your identifiers in your application to do the same? Clearly not. So why do you think the reverse is a reasonable choice?

The convention in PostgreSQL has come about through a mix of standards compliance and long-term experience of its users. Stick with it.

If translating between column-names and identifiers gets tedious, have the computer do it - they're good at things like that. I'm guessing almost all of the 9-million database abstraction libraries out there can do that. If you have a dynamic language it'll take you all of two lines of code to swap column-names to identifiers in CamelCase.

Answer 3

I know this is late however for something that would be simple to translate on the fly, you could write a small help function that would live in your code as such:

function FormatObjForDb(srcObj){

const newObj = {};

Object.keys(srcObj).forEach(key => newObj[key.toLowerCase()] = srcObj[key]);

return newObj;

}

export const formatObjForDb = FormatObjForDb;