Database Design – Standard Naming for Credential Systems

database-designloginsnaming convention

Is there a standard naming convention in regards to credential oriented systems? (Logins) The only one I could really come up with (in a shorthand form) is using the word "Gateway". Representing a gateway to further functionality behind a log in form.

Please note. I am NOT asking for suggestions on what I should name my schema objects. I am asking if there is an established standard for naming such things. If there is not then an adequate answer would outline this fact. Please do not post opinions on what you believe is the right way

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If I understand your question correctly, the mechanism you are describing is an authentication system.

Basically speaking, this kind of mechanism allows the identification of a certain party (e.g., a person or a machine process) that is attempting to access a particular system. Said party provides a certain set of credentials that are compared with information stored (or retrieved) by the authentication mechanism, and if such set of credentials matches the information stored (or retrieved) by the authentication tool, the involved party receives successful access to the system, otherwise access is denied.

Examples of authentication instruments are the ones created for web applications by means of:

If you are interested in authentication processes carried out by concrete database management systems, you might find of help:

Authentication systems are closely related to authorization components which, to put it short, take care of determining whether a specific party has permissions to perform a precise action within a given system.

A platform that assists in the development of both authentication and authorization elements pertaining to different types of application programs is:

The Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS)

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Naming Tables and Views – Standard Naming Conventions to Follow

OK, first NEVER put tbl in front of a table's name. It's a table, we already now that. That's called Hungarian Notation, and people stopped doing that 5+ years ago.

Just call the object based on what it is. If a table holds employee data call it "Employee". If it holds information about computers call it "Computer". If it maps computers to employees call it "EmployeeComputer" or "ComputerEmployee" (personally I like "EmployeeComputer" better).

There's no real right naming convention to use (other than to not use Hungarian Notation). As long as the object names make sense that it what is important.

Column name naming conventions and best practices

This has been asked before on SO.

Where you have common and very ambiguous names, then prefix with table name. That is, anything you're liable to have to alias in almost every query.

So for an Employee table I'd have

EmployeeID
EmployeeName
Comment
Salary
StartDate
EndDate
InsertedDateTime
...

And Wikipedia actually says:

The USING construct is more than mere syntactic sugar, however, since the result set differs from the result set of the version with the explicit predicate. Specifically, any columns mentioned in the USING list will appear only once, with an unqualified name, rather than once for each table in the join.

That is one less column. You'd never use SELECT * anyway so the point is moot...

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Naming Tables and Views – Standard Naming Conventions to Follow

Column name naming conventions and best practices

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