Re: simple or global column names?

On Nov 8, 2005, at 10:28 AM, george young wrote:

> I.e., should a field in steps be "version" or "step_version"? On
> one hand,
> the "step_" prefix is redundant noise in this context, but for
> doing joins,
> it seems like globally distinct names might make things clearer.
>
> Are there other advantages/disadvantages to these naming schemes?
>
> My goals (in this major schema reorganization) are simplicty,
> clarity, and
> in particular, to facilitate nieve users' read-only ODBC access
> through
> Excel or other GUI clients.

I find it annoying to read and write column names that are prefixed
with table names or some variant. It is easy enough to deal with
joins. Something like

select s.title as "Song Title", b.title as "Book Title" from song s,
book b ...;

And for read only access, views are an easy way to present whatever
column titles are the most user friendly.

John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
Power Tools for PostgreSQL