Sunday, April 03, 2005

Database Design and Maintenance

I have been working with Databases for some time now - predominantly, database design and maintenance ("maintenance" includes as much "schema maintenance" as much as of the database maintenance itself. "DBA" would be a slightly glorified term to describe my work, so I am avoiding using that term). Much of my work has also involved writing all the SQL queries required for my project - from the simplest task such as authenticating a user to the queries required for the most involved business functions.

Throughout these years, I have been searching - in vain - for two things: one, a industry-accepted template for documenting database design and two, schema-naming guidelines (similar to coding guidelines). I have my own practices and norms that I follow for both, but I have not been able to find anything concrete on the Web. In contrast, Google "coding guidelines" and you will be innundated with results; not so with "Database Schema naming guidelines". Whatever results you get for this either describe rules for naming as implemented by various DBMSs (e.g. USER name cannot be more than 30 characters long) or are synopsis of some paid lecture.

I was wondering if there exists any established guidelines for these?