This is a real pet peeve of mine, and I know some of you consider what I'm about to rant about to be some form of “best practices” or that “it just makes sense”, but I don't like it and I wish you'd stop.  Here's the issue:  Singular vs. Plural names of objects and variables.  Everyone will probably agree that have a naming convention for your database objects is important.  And most developers agree that having meaningful variable names is important too.  Now, do everyone a favor and stop mixing singulars and plurals together!

For database objects, just decide whether they are going to be singular or plural and stick with it.  It is really annoying to have to remember that the table names are Employer and Customers.  Or was that Employers and Customer?  And Microsoft is guilty of this too!  Have you looked at the Northwind and Pubs databases?  Northwind:  shippers and suppliers but region; Pubs:  authors, discounts, jobs, and publishers, but employee, roysched, and titleauthor.  My position is that not every tablename will make sense as a plural, but everything can make sense as singular, so I only use singular names.

I know some of you will argue that a table is a collection of records and so the table would be properly known as Employees and one record is an Employee, but I just don't buy it.  It's easier to adapt to knowing that everything will be singular.  If you want plurals, then talk about the Employee records that are found in the Employee table.  Or, heck, talk about Employees all you want, but everyone knows that when they have to code, the real object name is Employee.

And programmers are just as bad with their variable names.  It drives me crazy to see something like For Each Employee in Employees... or some such nonsense.  First, it makes it hard to read all the other lines where you have to distinquish between whether the single or plural is being acted upon.  And if you're editing, it's really easy to overlook whether the “s” was there or not or should have been.  Second it makes all communication difficult.  It is too easy to say or type the singular when you meant the plural or vice-versa.  Try using something like EmployeeList for the plural, or ThisEmployee for the singular.  Just don't make them identical except for one letter!

I actually ran into this problem today talking about two different tables in the same database.  They were named almost identically, except to really irritate us, not only was there a mix of singular and plural, but somebody used an abbreviation for one of them.  So, for example, assume that the table names were Letter and Ltrs.  They are related but contain very different information.  Now, imagine having a long-distance phone conversation with someone explaing that they need to make a change to the “letters” table.  Which one am I talking about?  Did I mistakenly add an “s” when I am talking about the Letter table?  Or am I trying to pronounce Ltrs without saying L-T-R-S?

Save yourself the headache and money.  Remember I bill by the hour, and if it takes an extra 10 minutes per day for us to go through the “Do you mean the X or Y table?” or “Oh! I thought you meant X not Y.” then that's nearly an extra hour per week that you are paying me just to clarify our communication because somebody used a bad naming convention.  Over the course of a year-long contract, that's 6 full days' worth of work that you paid for.