Question

What is the best practice for naming the column that is the primary key for a mysql table? I have seen two ways:

1. ‘id’
2. tableName_id (Where tableName is substituted for the name of the table).

I would have thought just id would suffice, because you can still uniquely identify the column by selecting the column proceeded by a period and the table name (i.e. for the column ‘id’ in the table ‘cars’, you could select it as cars.id)

Or am I over-thinking it all?

Answer 1

I usually name them as [tblname]_id. The reason is simple. Let’s say I have two tables:

member
    member_id
    member_alias
    ...

post
    post_id
    member_id
    post_text
    ...

Now I can join them with MySQLs USING-syntax and save a few characters for each join:

SELECT post.*, member_id, member_alias FROM post
    INNER JOIN member USING (member_id)

Of course, this is all mostly subjective.