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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T11:49:20+00:00

In our dev group we have a raging debate regarding the naming convention for

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In our dev group we have a raging debate regarding the naming convention for Primary and Foreign Keys. There’s basically two schools of thought in our group:

1: 

Primary Table (Employee)   
Primary Key is called ID

Foreign table (Event)  
Foreign key is called EmployeeID

or

2: 

Primary Table (Employee)  
Primary Key is called EmployeeID

Foreign table (Event)  
Foreign key is called EmployeeID

I prefer not to duplicate the name of the table in any of the columns (So I prefer option 1 above). Conceptually, it is consistent with a lot of the recommended practices in other languages, where you don’t use the name of the object in its property names. I think that naming the foreign key EmployeeID (or Employee_ID might be better) tells the reader that it is the ID column of the Employee Table.

Some others prefer option 2 where you name the primary key prefixed with the table name so that the column name is the same throughout the database. I see that point, but you now can not visually distinguish a primary key from a foreign key.

Also, I think it’s redundant to have the table name in the column name, because if you think of the table as an entity and a column as a property or attribute of that entity, you think of it as the ID attribute of the Employee, not the EmployeeID attribute of an employee. I don’t go an ask my coworker what his PersonAge or PersonGender is. I ask him what his Age is.

So like I said, it’s a raging debate and we go on and on and on about it. I’m interested to get some new perspectives.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It doesn’t really matter. I’ve never run into a system where there is a real difference between choice 1 and choice 2.

    Jeff Atwood had a great article a while back on this topic. Basically people debate and argue the most furiously those topics which they cannot be proven wrong on. Or from a different angle, those topics which can only be won through filibuster style endurance based last-man-standing arguments.

    Pick one and tell them to focus on issues that actually impact your code.

    EDIT: If you want to have fun, have them specify at length why their method is superior for recursive table references.

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