Database Naming Standards

In the late 80s, the only naming standard I saw for database objects were vague ones like ‘tbl’ for table, ‘qry’ for query. I noticed that these were pretty useless when you would get a list of about fifty tables and a few hundred stored procedures.

For tables, I started using things like ‘Profile’ for major single objects, ‘Lu’ for Lookups, ‘Trans’ for transactional tables, ‘Bfr’ for temporary buffers. For stored procedures I’d use ‘sel’ for select, ‘upd’ for update, etc.

When my stored procedures got into the hundreds, I added a single letter to the beginning to represent business area (‘p’ for property/real estate, ‘i’ for investor, etc.).

Has anyone else come up with any naming convention ideas for larger projects? I’m getting to the point where I’m going to put a business tag on my tables, I think.