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

Answer 1

Possible alternatives:

• Rename the table SystemUser
• Use brackets
• Keep the plural table names.

IMO using brackets is technically the safest approach, though it is a bit cumbersome. IMO it's 6 of one, half-a-dozen of the other, and your solution really just boils down to personal/team preference.

Answer 2

Singular. I don't buy any argument involving which is most logical - every person thinks his own preference is most logical. No matter what you do it is a mess, just pick a convention and stick to it. We are trying to map a language with highly irregular grammar and semantics (normal spoken and written language) to a highly regular (SQL) grammar with very specific semantics.

My main argument is that I don't think of the tables as a set but as relations.

So, the AppUser relation tells which entities are AppUsers.

The AppUserGroup relation tells me which entities are AppUserGroups

The AppUser_AppUserGroup relation tells me how the AppUsers and AppUserGroups are related.

The AppUserGroup_AppUserGroup relation tells me how AppUserGroups and AppUserGroups are related (i.e. groups member of groups).

In other words, when I think about entities and how they are related I think of relations in singular, but of course, when I think of the entities in collections or sets, the collections or sets are plural.

In my code, then, and in the database schema, I use singular. In textual descriptions, I end up using plural for increased readability - then use fonts etc. to distinguish the table/relation name from the plural s.

I like to think of it as messy, but systematic - and this way there is always a systematically generated name for the relation I wish to express, which to me is very important.

Answer 3

Tables: plural

Multiple users are listed in the users table.

Models: singular

A singular user can be selected from the users table.

Controllers: plural

http://myapp.com/users would list multiple users.

That's my take on it anyway.

Answer 4

The system tables/views of the server itself (SYSCAT.TABLES, dbo.sysindexes, ALL_TABLES, information_schema.columns, etc.) are almost always plural. I guess for the sake of consistency I'd follow their lead.

Answer 5

I think using the singular is what we were taught in university. But at the same time you could argue that unlike in object oriented programming, a table is not an instance of its records.

I think I'm tipping in favour of the singular at the moment because of plural irregularities in English. In German it's even worse due to no consistent plural forms - sometimes you cannot tell if a word is plural or not without the specifying article in front of it (der/die/das). And in Chinese languages there are no plural forms anyway.

Answer 6

I've always used singular simply because that's what I was taught. However, while creating a new schema recently, for the first time in a long time, I actively decided to maintain this convention simply because... it's shorter. Adding an 's' to the end of every table name seems as useless to me as adding 'tbl_' in front of every one.