Karen,
Many of us that started programming a long time ago had many limitations in relation of variable name size and the characters you could use; in many systems the underscore was the easiest way to make the name more legible. I have evolved in the way I name columns/tables variables; “custname” became “cust_name” and then “customer_name” and now I use “CustomerName”…much easier to read, in my opinion. Javier, Javier Valencia, PE O: 913-829-0888 H: 913-397-9605 C: 913-915-3137 From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Karen Tellef Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2013 11:06 AM To: RBASE-L Mailing List Subject: [RBASE-L] - Re: Thoughts about temp tables? Tony: I've been paying more attention to column naming conventions in temp tables recently too. One thing I do is for text columns, I always include the number of characters. So ClientName45 would have a datatype of Text 45, in case somewhere else someone defines a ClientName of only 40. And I sometimes put a "tmp" in front of the column names to distinguish from real columns. Sorry, but I REFUSE to use underscores in my table / column / variable names! Too hard to type and looks too jumbled for my eyes.... That would be another topic! Karen -----Original Message----- From: Tony IJntema <[email protected]> To: RBASE-L Mailing List <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, Jan 8, 2013 10:57 am Subject: [RBASE-L] - RE: Thoughts about temp tables? Karen, Most of the time I create the needed temp tables as an ordinary permanent table in the database. They even sometimes contain some data, which can be useful for testing Then I make use of the project statement to create the temp table. The temp table has the same name as the original, but it starts with T_ . The used where clause in this case could be ‘where limit = 0’. An empty temp table is the result of the project statement. Of course for safety reasons you better start with the drop statement. In this way I think you will not be confronted by the error you have encountered and the used temp tables are visible for anyone in the project Secondly I make use of a strict naming convention for the tables and columns. In 9.5 64 there are no real limits in the length of a table and column name anymore. Every tables starts with an abbreviation like CMR_Customer and every column in that table starts with CMR_ , unless it is a foreign key The primary key is always CMR_ID. If it is used as an foreign key you easily can see to which table it belongs. Tony From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]?> ] On Behalf Of Karen Tellef Sent: dinsdag 8 januari 2013 17:18 To: RBASE-L Mailing List Subject: [RBASE-L] - Thoughts about temp tables? Since the list has been slow, let me throw a question out there. When you write a program that uses temp tables, do you leave the temp tables out there? Or do you delete them? I always leave them, simply because I sometimes want to get to the r> prompt and look at the temp table. I'm not sure whether there's any space/memory/performance issues with having them there. The reason it comes to mind is that last week I had a program fail, and it turns out that another programmer on this client (we work as a team) and I happened to pick the same name for a column to use in a temp table, and of course we used a different data type! If I work alone I have a pretty good memory of what I might have used for temp table column names (although not 100%). And I try to use existing column names whenever possible. What do you do? Karen
