Question

I’m working with a legacy application with surprise surprise, next to no useful documentation on naming convensions or over all data structure.

There are similarly named tables in the database with one of them ending in HX. Does this hold any significance in anyones database experience?

The data seems to be replicated so I would assume that it is a Historical table of sorts, but I just want to be sure before I avoid populating it.

Thanks in Advance.

Cory

Answer 1

In the few places I’ve come across this it was related to history tables. It has depended on the system. I’ve seen this mostly in the Oil & Gas world, not so much outside that industry.

I shouldn’t just assume that’s the case though. If it’s possible, I’d do a dependency search to find out if there are any scripts dependent upon the table – if they’re history tables, you’ll likely find a copy procedure or trigger somewhere to keep them populated.

Check out sp_depends to see if that can shed any light on the subject.

Exec sp_depends 'table_name_hx'

You should get a list of everything that’s got references to it and what type of object is referencing.