Plus, if you're going to be consistent with that "mistake", then your naming
should be:
customer_customer
customer_account
customer_account_type
I disagree. I wasn't trying to create "customer" as a prefix. I was
simply renaming the tables based on the one:many relationships I have
inside the tables.
account
account_type
customer
since customer stores an account_id, and account stores an account_type
id, I could have picked customer to be the main level table, and just
references out from there:
customer.account_id -> account.id ->
account.type_id -> account_type.id
-> ..... ->...
-> ...... -> ...
Really inefficient, but it was another method of "standardizing" (which to
me, gives no clarity, because as I've explained in one of my other emails,
starting at one top level will make things confusing. And then what
happens if some new table references customer.id as customer_id? like an
emails table? Then I'm really confused:
email
email_customer
email_customer_account
email_customer_account_type
I know this is messed up, but it was my thinking for a while as I tried to
create a "Perfect" relational standard. And I had no many to many
relationships at that point, so it was really easy to do, but very
ineffective.
One additional consideration, which was discussed last week, was not
entitling the index of all tables as "id", but rather adding the table name
to the id, such as:
customer_id
account_id
account_type_id
That makes sense to me because when you're dealing with a bunch of tables, a
variable named "id" might be used incorrectly OR overwritten.
This is what I've usually done in the past.
For example, using:
SELECT * FROM customer WHERE customer_id = '$customer_id'
is just as easy to read as:
SELECT * FROM customer WHERE id = '$id'
But later in the code, after reading many different tables, what table does
"$id" relate to? It's not clear is it? But there is no confusion with
$customer_id is there?
HTH's
Thanks for your input!
-Matt
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