On Sat, 2015-08-22 at 15:15 +0000, Melvin Davidson wrote:
I've been searching for a "PostgreSQL Developer Best Practices" with not much luck, so I've started my own. At the risk of stirring up a storm of controversy, I would appreciate additional suggestions and feedback.
You might add: Create all relation names as plurals.
Or, if your site uses predominantly singular names, make that the standard. Consistency within the site is more important than any dogmatic belief about whether singular or plural forms is better. If you don't put it in the standard, someone will eventually create tables with names that don't gel with everything else.
__ Marc
Actually I would suggest standardising on singular names, not JUST because that this the standard I prefer! :-)
But (also) because:
1. Singular words tend to be shorter
2. plurals are more ambiguous wrt spelling
3. there other good reasons, that I've forgotten for now :-( (but I remember having them!!!)
Because my first college IS professor taught it this
way...I do like these other reasons though.
The fact that a table can have multiple rows is pretty much a given - and I wouldn't suggest plural adherents name any singleton tables using the singular form - so no information is lost. Having since learned OO the class of something is labelled in the singular form and in many ways a relation definition is equivalent to a class definition.