We'll go no more a' tibbling

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We'll go no more a' tibbling

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kismert SSC Enthusiast Points: 102 More actions · Answer 1

The sense I get is, for a well-defined environment like SQL Server, there is barely any justification for tibbling.

But, once you move into the sprawling and usually chaotic development environment surrounding the database server, the tibblers have a definite argument: prefixing can reduce the time it takes to do things that can't be neatly managed by your tools.

Tibbling can help mitigate the complexities of real-life development, and can be a fig leaf for the inadequacies of your IDE.

But, it's not a cure-all, and is certainly redundant work in well-controlled, disciplined development environments.

TomThomson SSC Guru Points: 104773 More actions · Answer 2

GilaMonster (1/25/2010)

The only thing that I use prefixes on are indexes, primary keys and unique constraints. Why? Well, two reasons. They never appear in code (or at least shouldn't) and so the more complex name is not a burden anywhere. So I can see, when looking at a query's execution plan whether the index used is just an index or if it's one of the constraints as the only thing that the exec plan tells me is whether or not the index is clustered

Gail, I agree with all the earlier part of your comment but on constraint naming I don't agree - my default constraint names, check constraint names and foreign key constraint names are tbled (or dfed and cked and fked if you prefer) as well as indexes, primary keys, and unique constraints. My first reason is the same as the first reason for the IX, PK, and UQ. My second reason is that I'm lazy (why name it myself when the database engine can name it for me and save me both thought and typing?) and the database engine generates tbled names for these constraints. Do you really avoid prefixes for Default and Check and Foreign Key names?

I mostly use functional prefixes for table, view, and UDF names so that I end up with table names like Music_Track, Music_Album, Movie_License_Extension, Movie_Category, Radio_Station, Radio_Region, TV_Channel, TV_Category and so on; this means that related things are grouped together in EM, QA or SSMS object views. I think I differ slightly from you here - I use singular not plural for table names.

For SP names I put the verb first: get_MusicAlbumDetails rather than music_getAlbumDetails because I believe that the greater clarity of the name outweighs the loss of convenient grouping in SSMS etc.

Tom

TomThomson SSC Guru Points: 104773 More actions · Answer 3

mbarrington (1/25/2010)
While this doesn't invalidate any points made about archaic prefixing practices in people use in DBs, maybe you would be interested in this tidbit on Hungarian Notation...
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html
If you skip down to "I’m Hungary" it talks about a great confusion with the concept.

Yeah, but Phil's rant (sorry Phil, I mean "editorial") is about tbling, which is Doc Group Hungarian (or Systems Hungarian, whichever name you prefer) not Apps Hungarian.

Of course if anyone wants to see Apps Hungarian used now (and maybe it would be a good idea for some application types in some programming languages) they will have to call it something different, as the Doc Group's screw-up caused a complete nonsense to be spread widely under the "Hungarian" name, totally discrediting anything called "Hungarian Notation".

Tom