Re: Long column names...Performance issues?

On Nov 19, 12:29 pm, chenthorn <car..._at_hotmail.com> wrote:
> My group is working to create a new set of Db standards as we embark
> upon redesigning our new web app backend db. The other architect wants
> every table/column/variable name to be unabbreviated and as
> descriptive as possible. This of course leads to long and ungainly
> names. while this is all well and fine in theory, when writing a lot
> of code, long column names are no fun and often lead to bugs due to
> spelling errors (Not that I would know anything about that )
>
> I would like to hear from the community what you all feel are best
> practices regarding naming conventions, and how they affect your
> environment.
>
> Thanks in advance!

I'm not an expert, I just like to post in newsgroups.

In my experience, naming debates can be a psychological pain in the behind. (It could just be me tho.) What I like to do is make my naming modular going from left to right so that the names sort but thats just sort of a tiebreaker for me. Obviously the most important names in any programming project are going to be the more public interfaces, like modules that get referenced in many other modules, these are the ones you want to name carefully if you can.

Long names would probably only impact performance slightly if your sql is dynamically created and even then I don't see that names would be so big that they'd even be a minute percentage of your performance concerns. Since most sql is going to be compiled internally in your sql server to be essentially numerically indexed objects, the actual impact of naming is going to be in the self documenting nature of your code and in that case its not so much the length of the names, its the quality. On the other hand, you can get stuck psychologically trying to find the best name for some wierd self referential variables that are difficult to name because they have no non computer equivalent or are incidental to the actual problem domain.

I remember one coder used to name his variables after random star trek characters and episodes. Received on Wed Nov 19 2008 - 20:26:57 CET