Hi. I’m looking for input on best practices in regards to entity attributes. Should the entity attribute and database table column name always match? Here are two situations where I think a difference may be appropriate.
Company Name. We would want Company.name to be the attribute but “name” is a reserved word in the database. So perhaps the COMPANY table column should be COMPANY_NAME.
Important Flag. We would want Company.important to be the attribute but maybe IS_IMPORTANT or IMPORTANT_F is a more appropriate column name.
Thoughts? Thanks.
There are no any restrictions on naming columns except DB requirements (not a reserved word, length, etc.), so the column names can differ from attributes.
And as far as I know, NAME is not a reserved word. At least it works perfectly on all databases supported by the platform. As for boolean attributes, we usually name columns with “IS_” prefix, like “IS_IMPORTANT”.