I have a legacy table that has as a part of its natural key a column named <table_name>_IDENTIFIER and it seems like it would be confusing to create a surrogate key named <table_name>_ID or ID so I'm leaning towards naming it SURROGATE_KEY. All my other tables use the <table_name>_ID syntax. Any better suggestions?
Don't call it SURROGATE_KEY. That is meaningless in any other context. I'd stick with <table_name>_ID. Yes it's a little confusing. But, given your established convention, anything else would be confusing too.
I might suggest that you go with your standard: <table_name>_ID
Eventually, the legacy table will not be the driving force, and it will be the IDENTIFIER column that will look odd, which is what you want, as opposed to that - 'oh yeah, i need to use surrogate_key for that thing instead of id...' moment.
First, I would not include the table name in my columns. A column is an attribute which requires the context of the entity to which it belongs. Having a "name" for example without the context to which it belongs is of no use. You need to know it is a Person's name or a Company name etc. and you have that in the name of the entity itself. Thus, I would not prefix columns with the name of the table in which it is declared.
That leaves you with choices like "Id", "Key", "SurrogateKey", or perhaps "SystemId" which are all equally vague. At least "SurrogateKey" describes what it is which is a bonus. That name will make sense to a DBA but perhaps not a developer (although they should understand the concept). Of those choices, I'd be inclined to use "Id" and find a way to change <table_name>_Identifier to something more descriptive.
In Data Modelling world during drawing ER model, Surrogate key like SURROGATE_KEY (or SURROGATE_ID) will definitely cause pain side-effects when creating Foreign Key Constraint.
I.e. linking parent with child in majority of DM tools via dragg-n-dropping primary key will automatically create identical column in a child generating dups in column names.
To avoid that as a rule of thumb, naming Surrogate key like Table_name.Table_name_ID or Table_name._ID can be good option.
Agreed . . . SURROGATE_ID is not recommended. What all the suggestions seem to be lacking is at the very heart of data management & data modelling best practices: establishing (& consistently using!) naming conventions & value domains. Suggestions:
1. If the database or programming protocol (like .NET which abhors natural primary keys as I've been lead to understand) requires a single, meaningless, integer assigned as a primary key -- a surrogate -- key, then create a value domain of "Id" & define it as data type integer with description of surrogate primary key.
2. When naming attributes/columns, the ONLY columns using the domain "Id" would be surrogate (primary) key columns populated with assigned integer values. No other attributes/columns would be allowed to use the domain "Id", so it would be absolutely clear from the attribute/column name the nature of the values stored AND how those values are begin utilized.
Thanks for the opportunity!
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Let's say I have two tables:
Table: Color
Columns: Id, ColorName, ColorCode
Table: Shape
Columns: Id, ShapeName, VertexList
What should I call the table that maps color to shape?
Table: ???
Columns: ColorId, ShapeId
There are only two hard things in
Computer Science: cache invalidation
and naming things-- Phil Karlton
Coming up with a good name for a table that represents a many-to-many relationship makes the relationship easier to read and understand. Sometimes finding a great name is not trivial but usually it is worth to spend some time thinking about.
An example: Reader and Newspaper.
A Newspaper has many Readers and a Reader has many Newspapers
You could call the relationship NewspaperReader but a name like Subscription might convey better what the table is about.
The name Subscription also is more idiomatic in case you want to map the table to objects later on.
The convention for naming many-to-many tables is a concatenation of the names of both tables that are involved in the relation. ColourShape would be a sensible default in your case. That said, I think Nick D came up with two great suggestions: Style and Texture.
How about ColorShapeMap or Style or Texture.
Interesting about half of the answers give a general term for any table that implements a many-to-many relationship, and the other half of the answers suggest a name for this specific table.
I called these tables intersections tables generally.
In terms of naming conventions, most people give a name that is an amalgam of the two tables in the many-to-many relationship. So in this case, "ColorShape" or "ShapeColor." But I find this looks artificial and awkward.
Joe Celko recommends in his book "SQL Programming Style" to name these tables in some natural language manner. For instance, if a Shape is colored by a Color, then name the table ColoredBy. Then you could have a diagram that more or less reads naturally like this:
Shape <-- ColoredBy --> Color
Conversely, you could say a Color colors a Shape:
Color <-- Colors --> Shape
But this looks like the middle table is the same thing as Color with a plural naming convention. Too confusing.
Probably most clear to use the ColoredBy naming convention. Interesting that using the passive voice makes the naming convention more clear.
Name the table whatever you like, as long as it is informative:
COLOR_SHAPE_XREF
From a model perspective, the table is called a join/corrollary/cross reference table. I've kept the habit of using _XREF at the end to make the relationship obvious.
A mapping table is what this is usually called.
ColorToShape
ColorToShapeMap
This is an Associative Entity and is quite often significant in its own right.
For example, a many to many relationship between TRAINS and TIMES gives rise to a TIMETABLE.
If there's no obvious new entity (such as timetable) then the convention is to run the two words together, giving COLOUR_SHAPE or similar.
I've worked with DBAs that call it a join table.
Colour_Shape is fairly typical - unless the relationship has an explicit domain-specific name.
Junction table
OR Bridge Table
OR Join Table
OR Map Table
OR Link Table
OR Cross-Reference Table
This comes into use when we go for many-to-many relationships where the keys from both the tables forms the composite primary key of the junction table.
I recommend using a combination of the names of entities and put them in the plural. Thus the name of the table will express connection "many-to-many".
In your case:
Color + Shape = ColorsShapes
I usually hear that called a Junction Table. I name the table by what it joins, so in your case either ColorShape, or ShapeColor. I think it makes more sense for a Shape to have a color than for a Color to have a shape, so I would go with ShapeColor.
Intermediate Table or a Join Table
I would name it "ColorShapes" or "ColorShape", depending on your preference
I've also heard the term Associative table used.
a name for your table might be ColorShapeAssociations meaning that each row represents an association between that color and that shape. The existence of a row implies that the color comes in that shape, and that the shape comes in that color. All rows with a specific color would be the set of all shapes the color is associated with, and the rows for a specific shape would be the set of all colors that shape came in...
In general most databases have some sort of naming convention for indexes, primary key and so forth. In PostgreSQL the following naming has been suggested:
primary key: tablename_columnname_pkey
unique constraint: tablename_columnname_key
exclusive constraint: tablename_columnname_excl
index for other purposes: tablename_columnname_idx
foreign key: tablename_columnname_fkey
sequence: tablename_columnname_seq
triggers: tablename_actionname_after|before_trig
Your table is a linked table to me. To stay in line with the naming above I would choose the following:
linked table: tablename1_tablename2_lnk
In a list of table objects the linked table will be after tablename1. This might be visually more appealing. But you could also choose a name that describes the purpose of the link like others have suggested. This might help to keep the name of the id column short (if your link must have its own named id and is referenced in other tables).
or liked table: purposename_lnk
A convention I see a lot for joining tables that I personally like is 'Colour_v_Shape', which I've heard folk refer to colloquially as 'versus tables'.
It makes it very clear at a glance that the table represents a many-to-many relationship, and helps avoid that (albeit rare) confusing situation when you try to concatenate two words that might otherwise form a compound word, for example 'Butter' and 'Milk' may become 'ButterMilk', but what if you also needed to represent an entity called 'Buttermilk'?
Doing it this way, you'd have 'Butter_v_Milk' and 'Buttermilk' - no confusion.
Also, I like to think there's a Foo Fighters reference in the original question.
"Many-Many" table. I'd call it "ColourShape" or vice versa.
I've always been partial to the term "Hamburger Table". Don't know why - it just sounds good.
Oh, and I would call the table ShapeColor or ColorShape depending on which is the more commonly used table.
It's hard to answer something as arbitrary as this, but I tend to prefer tosh's idea of naming it after something in the actual domain instead of some generic description of the underlying relationships.
Quite often this sort of table will evolve into something richer for the domain model and will take on additional attributes above and beyond the linked foreign keys.
For example, what if you need to store a texture in addition to color? It might seem a bit funky to expand the SHAPE_COLOR table to hold its texture.
On the other hand, there's also something to be said for making a well-informed decision based on what requirements you have today and being prepared to refactor when additional requirements are introduced later.
All that said, I would call it SURFACE if I had insight that there would be additional surface-like properties introduced later. If not, I'd have no problems calling it SHAPE_COLOR or something of the sort and moving on to more pressing design problems.
Maybe just ColoredShape?
I'm not sure I get the question. Is this about this specific case or are you looking for general guidelines?
I would name it with the exact names of the tables being joined = ColorShape.
In adiction to what Developer Art has related,
ColorShape
would be a usual naming convention. In ER diagram, it would be a relation.
Call it a cross reference table.
XREF_COLOR_SHAPE
(
XCS_ID INTEGER
C_ID INTEGER
S_ID INTEGER
)
I'd use r_shape_colors or r_shape_color depending on its meaning.
r_ would a replacement for xref_ in this case.
My vote is for a name that describes the table best. In this case it might be ShapeColor but in many cases a name different from a concatenation is better. I like readability and for me, that means no suffixes, no underscores and no prefixes.
I would personally go for Colour_Shape, with the underscore: just because I have seen this convention turn up quite a bit. [but agree with the other posts here that there are probably more 'poetic' ways of doing this].
Bear in mind that the foreign keys should also be built on this join table which would reference both the Colour & Shape tables which would also help with identifying the relationship.
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Table Naming Dilemma: Singular vs. Plural Names
Is it better to use singular or plural database table names ? Is there an accepted standard ?
I've heard arguments for and against it, what do you guys think ?
Singular, so you can have:
Customer
CustomerAddress
CustomerAddressAuditTrail
etc.
IMHO, Table names should be plural like Customers.
Class names should be singular like Customer if it maps to a row in Customers table.
I like singular names but appear to be in the minority.
My personal philosophy is that using a plural database table name is redundant, unless you're only planning for the table to contain one row.
I like to use singular names like Agent that have PK names like AgentID.
But that's just me :o)
I like to use plural forms, simply because one table contains several entities, so it seems more natural to me.
Linq to SQL converts plural form table names to singular when creating data entities. I assume that Microsoft would not have implemented this functionality if they considered plural forms for table names bad practice.
At my current company we use Plural for table names. The reasoning is this: If we have a Customers table we consider each row a Customer, so the table itself is a collection of customers.
Well, obviously your database table names have absolutely got to be named in a "standard" fashion which I will hitherto arbitrarily define.
First, all tables names shall be prefixed with "t_". Following this, the singular entity name in StudlyCaps, e.g. "Customer". Immediately afterwards, this shall contain the number of columns created in the first version of the schema, for historical purposes, followed by an underscore, and the precise normal form of the data; either "1", "2", "3" or "B" for BCNF. Any higher normal forms shall be denoted by a "P".
Some examples of acceptable names are:
t_Customer_6_3
t_Order_5_B
t_OrderLine_4_2
I think my point is, it really doesn't matter, as long as the name is reasonably descriptive and naming is consistent.
The most important thing is to be consistent in your usage. It is annoying to have to remember which tables are plurals and which are not. Same thing with your field names, pick one stadard and use it. Don't make the poor developers have to determine if this table uses person_id or personid or peopleid or person$id, etc. It is amazing the amount of time you can waste when you don't have standards trying just to remember which table uses what.
There is no should or must be this way or that way correct answer to this question. It's up to the designer of the database and software.
As for me, I usually use singular names becouse when I do the E-R diagram I have an entity Customer , not Customers, so I keep it same as to not get confused.
Ofcourse some frameworks do favor one style or another, so you should be best of to follow those practices when you notice them.
There are many arguments for each, but it all boils down to what you feel comfortable with. Neither is wrong.
What's really important is that you are consistent. Choose one standard and stick to it, which one you choose is of less importance.
IMHO it doesn't really matter, just do whatever is comfortable with you and the people that are using the database.
I think I subconsciously list main data tables with an s and "pick list" or foreign key tables and singular.
As with lots of these types of questions the best answer is often "consistent". You can argue the table represents a single entity and as such deserves a singular name, or that it contains multiple instances of an entity so it should be plural. My advice is flip a coin and go with it for the entire database (or stick with the convention that already has a majority).
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Academia has it that table names should be the singular of the entity that they store attributes of.
I dislike any T-SQL that requires square brackets around names, but I have renamed a Users table to the singular, forever sentencing those using the table to sometimes have to use brackets.
My gut feel is that it is more correct to stay with the singular, but my gut feel is also that brackets indicate undesirables like column names with spaces in them etc.
Should I stay, or should I go?
I had same question, and after reading all answers here I definitely stay with SINGULAR, reasons:
Reason 1 (Concept). You can think of bag containing apples like "AppleBag", it doesn't matter if contains 0, 1 or a million apples, it is always the same bag. Tables are just that, containers, the table name must describe what it contains, not how much data it contains. Additionally, the plural concept is more about a spoken language one (actually to determine whether there is one or more).
Reason 2. (Convenience). it is easier come out with singular names, than with plural ones. Objects can have irregular plurals or not plural at all, but will always have a singular one (with few exceptions like News).
Customer
Order
User
Status
News
Reason 3. (Aesthetic and Order). Specially in master-detail scenarios, this reads better, aligns better by name, and have more logical order (Master first, Detail second):
1.Order
2.OrderDetail
Compared to:
1.OrderDetails
2.Orders
Reason 4 (Simplicity). Put all together, Table Names, Primary Keys, Relationships, Entity Classes... is better to be aware of only one name (singular) instead of two (singular class, plural table, singular field, singular-plural master-detail...)
Customer
Customer.CustomerID
CustomerAddress
public Class Customer {...}
SELECT FROM Customer WHERE CustomerID = 100
Once you know you are dealing with "Customer", you can be sure you will use the same word for all of your database interaction needs.
Reason 5. (Globalization). The world is getting smaller, you may have a team of different nationalities, not everybody has English as a native language. It would be easier for a non-native English language programmer to think of "Repository" than of "Repositories", or "Status" instead of "Statuses". Having singular names can lead to fewer errors caused by typos, save time by not having to think "is it Child or Children?", hence improving productivity.
Reason 6. (Why not?). It can even save you writing time, save you disk space, and even make your computer keyboard last longer!
SELECT Customer.CustomerName FROM Customer WHERE Customer.CustomerID = 100
SELECT Customers.CustomerName FROM Customers WHERE Customers.CustomerID = 103
You have saved 3 letters, 3 bytes, 3 extra keyboard hits :)
And finally, you can name those ones messing up with reserved names like:
User > LoginUser, AppUser, SystemUser, CMSUser,...
Or use the infamous square brackets [User]
I prefer to use the uninflected noun, which in English happens to be singular.
Inflecting the number of the table name causes orthographic problems (as many of the other answers show), but choosing to do so because tables usually contain multiple rows is also semantically full of holes. This is more obvious if we consider a language that inflects nouns based on case (as most do):
Since we're usually doing something with the rows, why not put the name in the accusative case? If we have a table that we write to more than we read, why not put the name in dative? It's a table of something, why not use the genitive? We wouldn't do this, because the table is defined as an abstract container that exists regardless of its state or usage. Inflecting the noun without a precise and absolute semantic reason is babbling.
Using the uninflected noun is simple, logical, regular and language-independent.
If you use Object Relational Mapping tools or will in the future I suggest Singular.
Some tools like LLBLGen can automatically correct plural names like Users to User without changing the table name itself. Why does this matter? Because when it's mapped you want it to look like User.Name instead of Users.Name or worse from some of my old databases tables naming tblUsers.strName which is just confusing in code.
My new rule of thumb is to judge how it will look once it's been converted into an object.
one table I've found that does not fit the new naming I use is UsersInRoles. But there will always be those few exceptions and even in this case it looks fine as UsersInRoles.Username.
Others have given pretty good answers as far as "standards" go, but I just wanted to add this... Is it possible that "User" (or "Users") is not actually a full description of the data held in the table? Not that you should get too crazy with table names and specificity, but perhaps something like "Widget_Users" (where "Widget" is the name of your application or website) would be more appropriate.
What convention requires that tables have singular names? I always thought it was plural names.
A user is added to the Users table.
This site agrees:
http://vyaskn.tripod.com/object_naming.htm#Tables
This site disagrees (but I disagree with it):
http://justinsomnia.org/writings/naming_conventions.html
As others have mentioned: these are just guidelines. Pick a convention that works for you and your company/project and stick with it. Switching between singular and plural or sometimes abbreviating words and sometimes not is much more aggravating.
How about this as a simple example:
SELECT Customer.Name, Customer.Address FROM Customer WHERE Customer.Name > "def"
vs.
SELECT Customers.Name, Customers.Address FROM Customers WHERE Customers.Name > "def"
The SQL in the latter is stranger sounding than the former.
I vote for singular.
I am of the firm belief that in an Entity Relation Diagram, the entity should be reflected with a singular name, similar to a class name being singular. Once instantiated, the name reflects its instance. So with databases, the entity when made into a table (a collection of entities or records) is plural. Entity, User is made into table Users. I would agree with others who suggested maybe the name User could be improved to Employee or something more applicable to your scenario.
This then makes more sense in a SQL statement because you are selecting from a group of records and if the table name is singular, it doesn't read well.
I stick with singular for table names and any programming entity.
The reason? The fact that there are irregular plurals in English like mouse ⇒ mice and sheep ⇒ sheep. Then, if I need a collection, i just use mouses or sheeps, and move on.
It really helps the plurality stand out, and I can easily and programatically determine what the collection of things would look like.
So, my rule is: everything is singular, every collection of things is singular with an s appended. Helps with ORMs too.
IMHO, table names should be plural like Customers.
Class names should be singular like Customer if it maps to a row in the Customers table.
Singular. I don't buy any argument involving which is most logical - every person thinks his own preference is most logical. No matter what you do it is a mess, just pick a convention and stick to it. We are trying to map a language with highly irregular grammar and semantics (normal spoken and written language) to a highly regular (SQL) grammar with very specific semantics.
My main argument is that I don't think of the tables as a set but as relations.
So, the AppUser relation tells which entities are AppUsers.
The AppUserGroup relation tells me which entities are AppUserGroups
The AppUser_AppUserGroup relation tells me how the AppUsers and AppUserGroups are related.
The AppUserGroup_AppUserGroup relation tells me how AppUserGroups and AppUserGroups are related (i.e. groups member of groups).
In other words, when I think about entities and how they are related I think of relations in singular, but of course, when I think of the entities in collections or sets, the collections or sets are plural.
In my code, then, and in the database schema, I use singular. In textual descriptions, I end up using plural for increased readability - then use fonts etc. to distinguish the table/relation name from the plural s.
I like to think of it as messy, but systematic - and this way there is always a systematically generated name for the relation I wish to express, which to me is very important.
I also would go with plurals, and with the aforementioned Users dilemma, we do take the square bracketing approach.
We do this to provide uniformity between both database architecture and application architecture, with the underlying understanding that the Users table is a collection of User values as much as a Users collection in a code artifact is a collection of User objects.
Having our data team and our developers speaking the same conceptual language (although not always the same object names) makes it easier to convey ideas between them.
I personaly prefer to use plural names to represent a set, it just "sounds" better to my relational mind.
At this exact moment i am using singular names to define a data model for my company, because most of the people at work feel more confortable with it.
Sometimes you just have to make life easier to everyone instead of imposing your personal preferences.
(that's how i ended up in this thread, to get a confirmation on what should be the "best practice" for naming tables)
After reading all the arguing in this thread, i reached one conclusion:
I like my pancakes with honey, no matter what everybody's favorite flavour is. But if i am cooking for other people, i will try to serve them something they like.
Singular. I'd call an array containing a bunch of user row representation objects 'users', but the table is 'the user table'. Thinking of the table as being nothing but the set of the rows it contains is wrong, IMO; the table is the metadata, and the set of rows is hierarchically attached to the table, it is not the table itself.
I use ORMs all the time, of course, and it helps that ORM code written with plural table names looks stupid.
I've actually always thought it was popular convention to use plural table names. Up until this point I've always used plural.
I can understand the argument for singular table names, but to me plural makes more sense. A table name usually describes what the table contains. In a normalized database, each table contains specific sets of data. Each row is an entity and the table contains many entities. Thus the plural form for the table name.
A table of cars would have the name cars and each row is a car. I'll admit that specifying the table along with the field in a table.field manner is the best practice and that having singular table names is more readable. However in the following two examples, the former makes more sense:
SELECT * FROM cars WHERE color='blue'
SELECT * FROM car WHERE color='blue'
Honestly, I will be rethinking my position on the matter, and I would rely on the actual conventions used by the organization I'm developing for. However, I think for my personal conventions, I'll stick with plural table names. To me it makes more sense.
I don't like plural table names because some nouns in English are not countable (water, soup, cash) or the meaning changes when you make it countable (chicken vs a chicken; meat vs bird).
I also dislike using abbreviations for table name or column name because doing so adds extra slope to the already steep learning curve.
Ironically, I might make User an exception and call it Users because of USER (Transac-SQL), because I too don't like using brackets around tables if I don't have to.
I also like to name all the ID columns as Id, not ChickenId or ChickensId (what do plural guys do about this?).
All this is because I don't have proper respect for the database systems, I am just reapplying one-trick-pony knowledge from OO naming conventions like Java's out of habit and laziness. I wish there were better IDE support for complicated SQL.
We run similar standards, when scripting we demand [ ] around names, and where appropriate schema qualifiers - primarily it hedges your bets against future name grabs by the SQL syntax.
SELECT [Name] FROM [dbo].[Customer] WHERE [Location] = 'WA'
This has saved our souls in the past - some of our database systems have run 10+ years from SQL 6.0 through SQL 2005 - way past their intended lifespans.
If we look at MS SQL Server's system tables, their names as assigned by Microsoft are in plural.
The Oracle's system tables are named in singular. Although a few of them are plural.
Oracle recommends plural for user-defined table names.
That doesn't make much sense that they recommend one thing and follow another.
That the architects at these two software giants have named their tables using different conventions, doesn't make much sense either... After all, what are these guys ... PhD's?
I do remember in academia, the recommendation was singular.
For example, when we say:
select OrderHeader.ID FROM OrderHeader WHERE OrderHeader.Reference = 'ABC123'
maybe b/c each ID is selected from a particular single row ...?
The system tables/views of the server itself (SYSCAT.TABLES, dbo.sysindexes, ALL_TABLES, information_schema.columns, etc.) are almost always plural. I guess for the sake of consistency I'd follow their lead.
I am a fan of singular table names as they make my ER diagrams using CASE syntax easier to read, but by reading these responses I'm getting the feeling it never caught on very well? I personally love it. There is a good overview with examples of how readable your models can be when you use singular table names, add action verbs to your relationships and form good sentences for every relationships. It's all a bit of overkill for a 20 table database but if you have a DB with hundreds of tables and a complex design how will your developers ever understand it without a good readable diagram?
http://www.aisintl.com/case/method.html
As for prefixing tables and views I absolutely hate that practice. Give a person no information at all before giving them possibly bad information. Anyone browsing a db for objects can quite easily tell a table from a view, but if I have a table named tblUsers that for some reason I decide to restructure in the future into two tables, with a view unifying them to keep from breaking old code I now have a view named tblUsers. At this point I am left with two unappealing options, leave a view named with a tbl prefix which may confuse some developers, or force another layer, either middle tier or application to be rewritten to reference my new structure or name viewUsers. That negates a large part of the value of views IMHO.
Tables: plural
Multiple users are listed in the users table.
Models: singular
A singular user can be selected from the users table.
Controllers: plural
http://myapp.com/users would list multiple users.
That's my take on it anyway.
I once used "Dude" for the User table - same short number of characters, no conflict with keywords, still a reference to a generic human. If I weren't concerned about the stuffy heads that might see the code, I would have kept it that way.
I've always used singular simply because that's what I was taught. However, while creating a new schema recently, for the first time in a long time, I actively decided to maintain this convention simply because... it's shorter. Adding an 's' to the end of every table name seems as useless to me as adding 'tbl_' in front of every one.
This may be a bit redundant, but I would suggest being cautious. Not necessarily that it's a bad thing to rename tables, but standardization is just that; a standard -- this database may already be "standardized", however badly :) -- I would suggest consistency to be a better goal given that this database already exists and presumably it consists of more than just 2 tables.
Unless you can standardize the entire database, or at least are planning to work towards that end, I suspect that table names are just the tip of the iceberg and concentrating on the task at hand, enduring the pain of poorly named objects, may be in your best interest --
Practical consistency sometimes is the best standard... :)
my2cents ---
As others have mentioned here, conventions should be a tool for adding to the ease of use and readability. Not as a shackle or a club to torture developers.
That said, my personal preference is to use singular names for both tables and columns. This probably comes from my programming background. Class names are generally singular unless they are some sort of collection. In my mind I am storing or reading individual records in the table in question, so singular makes sense to me.
This practice also allows me to reserve plural table names for those that store many-to-many relationships between my objects.
I try to avoid reserved words in my table and column names, as well. In the case in question here it makes more sense to go counter to the singular convention for Users to avoid the need to encapsulate a table that uses the reserved word of User.
I like using prefixes in a limited manner (tbl for table names, sp_ for proc names, etc), though many believe this adds clutter. I also prefer CamelBack names to underscores because I always end up hitting the + instead of _ when typing the name. Many others disagree.
Here is another good link for naming convention guidelines: http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/10/26/the-power-of-a-good-sql-naming-convention/
Remember that the most important factor in your convention is that it make sense to the people interacting with the database in question. There is no "One Ring to Rule Them All" when it comes to naming conventions.
Possible alternatives:
Rename the table SystemUser
Use brackets
Keep the plural table names.
IMO using brackets is technically the safest approach, though it is a bit cumbersome. IMO it's 6 of one, half-a-dozen of the other, and your solution really just boils down to personal/team preference.
My take is in semantics depending on how you define your container. For example, A "bag of apples" or simply "apples" or an "apple bag" or "apple".
Example:
a "college" table can contain 0 or more colleges
a table of "colleges" can contain 0 or more collegues
a "student" table can contain 0 or more students
a table of "students" can contain 0 or more students.
My conclusion is that either is fine but you have to define how you (or people interacting with it) are going to approach when referring to the tables; "a x table" or a "table of xs"
I think using the singular is what we were taught in university. But at the same time you could argue that unlike in object oriented programming, a table is not an instance of its records.
I think I'm tipping in favour of the singular at the moment because of plural irregularities in English. In German it's even worse due to no consistent plural forms - sometimes you cannot tell if a word is plural or not without the specifying article in front of it (der/die/das). And in Chinese languages there are no plural forms anyway.
I only use nouns for my table names that are spelled the same, whether singular or plural:
moose
fish
deer
aircraft
you
pants
shorts
eyeglasses
scissors
species
offspring
I did not see this clearly articulated in any of the previous answers. Many programmers have no formal definition in mind when working with tables. We often communicate intuitively in terms of of "records" or "rows". However, with some exceptions for denormalized relations, tables are usually designed so that the relation between the non-key attributes and the key constitutes a set theoretic function.
A function can be defined as a subset of a cross-product between two sets, in which each element of the set of keys occurs at most once in the mapping. Hence the terminology arising from from that perspective tends to be singular. One sees the same singular (or at least, non-plural) convention across other mathematical and computational theories involving functions (algebra and lambda calculus for instance).
I always thought that was a dumb convention. I use plural table names.
(I believe the rational behind that policy is that it make it easier for ORM code generators to produce object & collection classes, since it is easier to produce a plural name from a singular name than vice-versa)