Re: Plural or singular table names

>> Why is Personnel better than Employees? Are you talking about
people who might work for the entity but not be paid (as an example, I am writing a
system for An Óige, the Irish youth hostel organisation and there are some volunteer workers there)? <<

I am just giving an example of the words; I am not working from an actual logical model developed from an actual requirement. If Volunteers are logically different from other personnel, then they get another table with constraints for their business rules.

>> How about if it's only a table to do with pay? <<

So name it something like "SalarySchedule" -- a schedule being a collective noun.

>> Suppose that you have a table called "Employee_who_died_on_duty"
... would you give that a plural name or what? <<

Being dead is an attribute, so it should not be modeled as a table. But I'd go with "DeceasedPersonnel" if I had to. Unless of course we only had one dead guy in the company, then Employee_who_died_on_duty" might be okay if verbose.

>> Again, I fail to see why. A collection (set) of trees is not
necessarily a forest, but a forest is by definition a set of trees? <<

Again, it is an example of word choices and I don't have a specification or logical model. But you do understand that "Tree" is a singular occurrence, while "Forest", "Orchard" and "Timberyard" are collective and imply a set of such things with the implication that the set itself has properties that we need to model (i.e. "Orchard" implies fruit and nut trees that yield a crop; "Timberyard" impies timber to be processed). Received on Sun Sep 14 2003 - 01:11:35 CEST