Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I tend to prefer English suffixes and camelcase rather than Hungarian prefixes and underscores. Like, for a steel coil, InnerDiameterMM, MassTonnes, GaugeMM, etc. I prefer to leave abbreviations for cases where it's obvious even to non-experts, like mm for millimeters.


My only issue with that is you'd wind up with some very long column names.

Using prefixes you can encode a lot of information in a relatively short ID. Which may or may not be useful. As you mentioned though the downside is it requires some domain knowledge to decode.

A lot of our columns are in a form like this:

TP_TSC_HEX1_XXXXX

(where XXXX is some ID usually from scada system)

I can see from the name this is a temperature corresponding to thermocouple id: XXXX in TSC Heat exchanger 1.

Edit: I should also mention some programming languages (not sql) have a language feature for specifying named ranges (I think it is called lazy evaluation) which tends to favor prefixed names over suffixed - I.e x1,x2,...,xn to iterate over the prefixed range. We use SAS heavily at my work which supports using this syntax, which probably influenced the design of our DB tables.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact