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Is there a naming convention for table aliases?
Sometimes, either to reduce the amount of typing big table names or when joining a table to itself one will need to alias a table. Personally I find SQL statements with aliases harder to read and avoid using them if possible.
Is there a naming convention for choosing the alias names for ease of comprehension?
1 answer
This can depend on both your flavor of SQL and your personal preference - I've seen a number of schemes in use.
For MySQL, the most common scheme I've seen used (and the scheme that my editor uses in autocomplete suggestions) is to abbreviate using the first letter of each word. In a table called posts, the alias is p; in a table called post_history_tags, the alias is pht.
There's really no one universal convention: use whatever makes sense to you and the developers working on the same project.
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