Table Naming Dilemma: Singular vs. Plural Names [closed]

Answer 1

This may be a bit redundant, but I would suggest being cautious. Not necessarily that it's a bad thing to rename tables, but standardization is just that; a standard -- this database may already be "standardized", however badly :) -- I would suggest consistency to be a better goal given that this database already exists and presumably it consists of more than just 2 tables.

Unless you can standardize the entire database, or at least are planning to work towards that end, I suspect that table names are just the tip of the iceberg and concentrating on the task at hand, enduring the pain of poorly named objects, may be in your best interest --

Practical consistency sometimes is the best standard... :)

my2cents ---

Answer 2

As others have mentioned here, conventions should be a tool for adding to the ease of use and readability. Not as a shackle or a club to torture developers.

That said, my personal preference is to use singular names for both tables and columns. This probably comes from my programming background. Class names are generally singular unless they are some sort of collection. In my mind I am storing or reading individual records in the table in question, so singular makes sense to me.

This practice also allows me to reserve plural table names for those that store many-to-many relationships between my objects.

I try to avoid reserved words in my table and column names, as well. In the case in question here it makes more sense to go counter to the singular convention for Users to avoid the need to encapsulate a table that uses the reserved word of User.

I like using prefixes in a limited manner (tbl for table names, sp_ for proc names, etc), though many believe this adds clutter. I also prefer CamelBack names to underscores because I always end up hitting the + instead of _ when typing the name. Many others disagree.

Here is another good link for naming convention guidelines: http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/10/26/the-power-of-a-good-sql-naming-convention/

Remember that the most important factor in your convention is that it make sense to the people interacting with the database in question. There is no "One Ring to Rule Them All" when it comes to naming conventions.

Answer 3

IMHO, table names should be plural like Customers.

Class names should be singular like Customer if it maps to a row in the Customers table.

Answer 4

I personaly prefer to use plural names to represent a set, it just "sounds" better to my relational mind.

At this exact moment i am using singular names to define a data model for my company, because most of the people at work feel more confortable with it. Sometimes you just have to make life easier to everyone instead of imposing your personal preferences. (that's how i ended up in this thread, to get a confirmation on what should be the "best practice" for naming tables)

After reading all the arguing in this thread, i reached one conclusion:

I like my pancakes with honey, no matter what everybody's favorite flavour is. But if i am cooking for other people, i will try to serve them something they like.

Answer 5

If you use Object Relational Mapping tools or will in the future I suggest Singular.

Some tools like LLBLGen can automatically correct plural names like Users to User without changing the table name itself. Why does this matter? Because when it's mapped you want it to look like User.Name instead of Users.Name or worse from some of my old databases tables naming tblUsers.strName which is just confusing in code.

My new rule of thumb is to judge how it will look once it's been converted into an object.

one table I've found that does not fit the new naming I use is UsersInRoles. But there will always be those few exceptions and even in this case it looks fine as UsersInRoles.Username.

Answer 6

I once used "Dude" for the User table - same short number of characters, no conflict with keywords, still a reference to a generic human. If I weren't concerned about the stuffy heads that might see the code, I would have kept it that way.