Naming Standard

Is there a naming standard for database, table, and field names? Different projects all seem to do things a little bit differently and I was wondering if there was some sort of industry standard or not.

I found this which is pretty good reading, but it is just someone's weblog (opinion) on the subject. I'd like to know if there is anything more concrete.

Gregg,
We have company naming standards, but that's not much better than project ones. There are some things that are common across most or all standards (like underscores in the names.) However, I don't think there is one standard. Look at all the different coding standards for Java!

what i have come across is,

- underscores as a seperator in table and field name
- all caps in table and field names
- no standard naming for database name

i know it does matter, but does it really matter? i mean field names and table names are not case sensitive, though.
[ October 21, 2004: Message edited by: adeel ansari ]

That link is pretty good Gregg. There's a few things in there I'd disagree with (plural entity names drive me up the wall for example, but I'm well aware that is just a personal peculuarity), but that's true with every "standard" I've ever read.

We too have company defined standards. But we use them for a slightly different purpose - namely to remind developers that we support 5 different DB platforms. Standards are essential if you are doing that - there's lots of gotchas, like DB2 only supporting an object name length of <= 18 characters. I think they are less necessary otherwise. I'd be happy to see models defined anyway the DBA liked so long as the naming convention is internally consistant.

Thanks for the information. Luckily I only have to concern myself with one db vendor, so I've got it fairly easy. I guess I'll just create my own standard based on what I like from everyone else's standard and just be consistant with that.