Nick has a nice piece about normalization of database-schemas, or in his experience: the absence of it lately. I’m an educated databasedesigner myself, and when looking at the underlying databases of some applications I’ve used, shivers run down my spine most of the time. People not knowing how to normalize is something I can live with (it means my salary is justified), but if you create a schema for your application, at least be consistent in naming your tables and columns. Don’t mix plural and singular names, don’t use a hyphen in one occasion and an underscore in the other (if both are allowed), and for crying out loud: use sensible names. We have more than 64bkyte of memory in most computer nowadays, so why abbreviate everything to 3, 4 or 6 characters? Because it’s easier to type when coding? Get a decent IDE with CodeCompletion. That’s easier than trying to remember what all these cryptic TLAs stand for.
Apr 222004