Re: Plural or singular table names

On Sun, 31 Aug 2003 05:09:20 +0000, Ray Cassick (home) wrote:

> Well my company is going through its processes of writing company standards
> documents and we are at the age old question:
>
> "Should table names be in the plural or singular forms?"
>
> I figured that I would get a feel here for what the general consensus is
> from the group.
>
> I am from the school that says plural because the table holds multiples of
> one thing. A table that holds employee information should be called
> Employees.
>
> Some of the members of the group here simply think that the table should not
> be treated as holding a group of employees, but rather it should be treated
> as simply a place that contains information about THE employee.
>
> If someone can point me to a definitive standard (if one does exist) I would
> be most grateful. If we are going to go one way or another I want to have
> the decision documented in the appendix of the document so that when people
> read this years form now there is a clear path of WHY we decided what we
> did.

I was taught that table names should be plural since a table holds multiple rows of data and that column names should be singular since each column in a row should contain no more than one value.

From a practical point of view I don't think it makes much difference whether you use plural or singular for table names and column names as long as you are consistent. Received on Sun Aug 31 2003 - 16:06:15 CEST