SQL Server Coding Standards: Best way to define Table Identifiers

This article is half-done without your Comment! *** Please share your thoughts via Comment ***

Prepared by Bihag Thaker

Prefix the Table Name with ‘tbl_’.

Use proper, meaningful and self-explanatory identifiers for tables. The table identifier should be plural. Examples are tbl_Orders, tbl_Customers, tbl_Employees.

Try to include only letters in identifiers by using Pascal Casing and avoid the use of special characters in identifiers. Underscore (_) character may be used for element separation in an identifier.

Here element means Application Prefix, Group Name, Table Name or Entity Name etc. However, word separation in single element should be achieved with PascalCasing only. For example instead of using tbl_Page_Option_Types, use tbl_Page_OptionTypes.
In this, ‘Page_’ can be an Application Prefix or Group Name.

Use schemas to separate different sets of tables across multiple applications.

An Application Prefix along with underscore characters (_) may be used for a group of related tables like tbl_Page_Layouts, tbl_Page_Options, tbl_Page_Links for better manageability.