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

Answer 1

I did not see this clearly articulated in any of the previous answers. Many programmers have no formal definition in mind when working with tables. We often communicate intuitively in terms of of "records" or "rows". However, with some exceptions for denormalized relations, tables are usually designed so that the relation between the non-key attributes and the key constitutes a set theoretic function.

A function can be defined as a subset of a cross-product between two sets, in which each element of the set of keys occurs at most once in the mapping. Hence the terminology arising from from that perspective tends to be singular. One sees the same singular (or at least, non-plural) convention across other mathematical and computational theories involving functions (algebra and lambda calculus for instance).

Answer 2

Others have given pretty good answers as far as "standards" go, but I just wanted to add this... Is it possible that "User" (or "Users") is not actually a full description of the data held in the table? Not that you should get too crazy with table names and specificity, but perhaps something like "Widget_Users" (where "Widget" is the name of your application or website) would be more appropriate.

Answer 3

How about this as a simple example:

SELECT Customer.Name, Customer.Address FROM Customer WHERE Customer.Name > "def"

vs.

SELECT Customers.Name, Customers.Address FROM Customers WHERE Customers.Name > "def"

The SQL in the latter is stranger sounding than the former.

I vote for singular.

Answer 4

If we look at MS SQL Server's system tables, their names as assigned by Microsoft are in plural.

The Oracle's system tables are named in singular. Although a few of them are plural. Oracle recommends plural for user-defined table names. That doesn't make much sense that they recommend one thing and follow another. That the architects at these two software giants have named their tables using different conventions, doesn't make much sense either... After all, what are these guys ... PhD's?

I do remember in academia, the recommendation was singular.

For example, when we say:

select OrderHeader.ID FROM OrderHeader WHERE OrderHeader.Reference = 'ABC123'

maybe b/c each ID is selected from a particular single row ...?

Answer 5

I also would go with plurals, and with the aforementioned Users dilemma, we do take the square bracketing approach.

We do this to provide uniformity between both database architecture and application architecture, with the underlying understanding that the Users table is a collection of User values as much as a Users collection in a code artifact is a collection of User objects.

Having our data team and our developers speaking the same conceptual language (although not always the same object names) makes it easier to convey ideas between them.

Answer 6

I only use nouns for my table names that are spelled the same, whether singular or plural:

moose fish deer aircraft you pants shorts eyeglasses scissors species offspring