Tables with unconventional names such as ABC1234

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Tables with unconventional names such as ABC1234

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#1 by (6 votes)

5

I've seen some that some systems adopt a different way of naming tables with letters and numbers like ABC1234, XX_900 , etc.

These days I've been working on creating some queries on a system that uses this type of approach, more than 1200 tabelas to go through to find out where the data in a given table ( Produtos ) was.

Fortunately, I found some queries that made the task less painful, such as searching all tables for the name of the Produto column,

SELECT      c.name  AS 'ColumnName',
            t.name AS 'TableName'
FROM        sys.columns c
JOIN        sys.tables  t   ON c.object_id = t.object_id
WHERE       c.name LIKE '%produto%'
ORDER BY    TableName,
            ColumnName

Even though the number of tables returned was scary, more than 200!

So the question is:

What is the advantage of using this type of naming for tables? Is it just to hinder the lives of outsiders?

nomenclatura erp

asked by anonymous 14.01.2017 / 13:36

1 answer

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score 6 · Accepted Answer

This was a technique used in the 1970s, there was a limit of possible characters and giving meaningful names was not a priority, it was better to use codes. It made sense at the time. But not much. In fact I think people figured they would have thousands of tables one day and that restricting the size of the name would continue, which was naive.

Whoever did this at that time could have changed the pattern at least in new things. For some reason they think that keeping the standard makes up for it. I see no advantage.

Some people never had to do this, but saw that someone did and thought it was interesting. It's what I always say, people follow rules without knowing why. It was probably something like "a big company did like this, it should be good practice, I'll do the same".

Large ERPs often have many, many thousands of tables. I do not know if all are really necessary, but meeting well needs broadly horizontally and vertically requires all this.

I was a developer of such a system and it was terrible. Worse, it was created in the 90's and had better techniques than this, but they did not use it because someone who had power decision learned to do so and imposed that disgrace to what today are many thousands of developers dealing with that difficulty. But to be fair, after a while you get used to the names: D And the biggest complication is not even in the name. The structure of these tables and their relationships are often terrifying. Imagine a lot of people, each with their bias, without understanding the whole and what already exists, creating different things in something monolithic with deadlines weighing more than quality.

There's a lot, a lot even people do today because everybody always did it, but they did it because 50 years ago it's thanks, today it's not anymore. Comments for example .

Today's advantage is zero.