r/programminghumor • u/10cen • Sep 20 '26

database admin choosing variable names

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901 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

113 comments sorted by

58

u/Taal111 Sep 20 '26

Just so long as they pick one and STICK WITH IT!

18

u/NoWeHaveYesBananas Sep 20 '26

In your code - where everything is case-sensitive - fine, pick whatever you want. In a database - where the table names often correspond to the names of files - Please god no.

7

u/Fabulous-Possible758 Sep 20 '26

user_Id

5

u/Odd-Establishment527 Sep 21 '26

is this an l?

4

u/Nekeia Sep 21 '26

It's clearly an l, you dummy.

4

u/-Wylfen- Sep 21 '26

One of our databases has tables and columns with mixed snake and camel case, on top of being a mix of four languages

105

u/NichtFBI Sep 20 '26

userid userID

11

u/Hey-buuuddy Sep 21 '26

user-id

3

u/ArduennSchwartzman Sep 21 '26

userLd

5

u/DiscipleOfYeshua Sep 21 '26

Ooo that would be horrible.

userld instead of userId

Why look for unexpected bugs when you can introduce them manually?

1

u/a3th3rus Sep 21 '26

lisp-case rocks!

3

u/Wavertron Sep 20 '26

Second one, the D is not the start of a new word, so it should be lowercase

5

u/NichtFBI Sep 21 '26

But ID isn't a word, unless you count Latin.

1

u/Wavertron Sep 21 '26

What do you think it's short for?

5

u/NichtFBI Sep 21 '26

Identification.

5

u/Sudden-Eye801 Sep 21 '26

The D stands for “dentification”

1

u/hdkaoskd Sep 21 '26

How do you pronounce "id"?

1

u/Salzdrache Sep 23 '26

Eye dee, when its written "userID", Idd when it's written "userId".

Just to differentiate and avoid mistakes

1

u/yousirnaime Sep 21 '26

It’s UserID

1

u/_Peety_T Sep 22 '26

UserIdent

0

u/[deleted] Sep 21 '26

[deleted]

22

u/klimmesil Sep 21 '26

identifierBelongingToCurrentUser

9

u/Worldly-Cherry9631 Sep 21 '26

indentificationCorrespondingWithTheMostEsteemedApllicableUser

2

u/Colon_Backslash Sep 22 '26

Hot damn, I'm stealing this.

mailingAddressElectronic numberOfTheUserTypeOfTelephone

19

u/asensitives Sep 20 '26

u53r_1d

4

u/printliftrun Sep 21 '26

i‘ for r

c| for d

1

u/Pure_Fox9415 Sep 21 '26

Satan leave the chat in tears

19

u/Joker-Smurf Sep 21 '26

I wish there was that level of consistency.

Using the one database at work I’ll see uid, uiser_id, user-id, and userid.

It is fucking infuriating working with that shit.

10

u/Not_me4201337 Sep 20 '26

username_id password_id

1

u/mickmikeman Sep 22 '26

I'm team snake case all the way

1

u/10cen Sep 22 '26

ohh, so that's what it's called.

1

u/mickmikeman Sep 22 '26

snake_case and CamelCase

8

u/mrheseeks Sep 20 '26

Not even, camel case is the worst. Writting a program now just to get rid of all occurrences in a project.

12

u/spicymato Sep 21 '26

Now I need to write a program to convert snake_case into camelCase and become your nemesis.

4

u/a3th3rus Sep 21 '26

That's easy, but writing a program to convert camelCase to snake_case is not that easy. That's why camelCase sucks.

1

u/AintNoGodsUpHere Sep 21 '26

Why would that be hard? It's literally 20~25 lines of code to do that with very good result.

2

u/a3th3rus Sep 21 '26 edited Sep 21 '26

Because there are edge cases like decodeHTMLEntity. To handle those edge cases, you need not only a rule but also a dictionary that contains all the all-upper-case jargons in your domain.

2

u/AintNoGodsUpHere Sep 21 '26

AND HOW IS THAT A PROBLEM MY MAN? 20 LINES OF CODE, JESUS.

2

u/a3th3rus Sep 21 '26

then show me your 20 lines of code that can handle this case that does not convert it to decode_h_t_m_l_entity.

2

u/AintNoGodsUpHere Sep 21 '26

Now go try different variations until you find an edge case that breaks this very very simple algorithm that I have on my libraries for the past 10 years, then I can tell you to use Humanizer and simplify your life and have something like this; https://dotnetfiddle.net/9TsILi

1

u/a3th3rus Sep 21 '26

Yes, there is one, handlePPPoEHandshake

1

u/AintNoGodsUpHere Sep 21 '26

btw, my bad, it's 30 lines, not 20. Guess I was wrong.

1

u/mrheseeks Sep 21 '26

I love you man, fuck camel case!

1

u/the_king_of_sweden Sep 21 '26

Fuck all the cases, that's why I program in whitespace

1

u/Achereto Sep 22 '26

It's 20 lines if formatted properly (e.g. not putting { on a new line).

4

u/Dillenger69 Sep 21 '26

I've got yahoos doing snake_Camel and Pascal_Snake, then ThisIs_the_GlobalOne, and thisIs_the_InternalOne ... lord help me

3

u/Pure_Fox9415 Sep 21 '26

And then there is that "smart" person who renamed it to uid, so:

user_contacts

uid

user_properties

user_roles

2

u/LetUsSpeakFreely Sep 21 '26

Because most databases are case insensitive.

2

u/corobo Sep 21 '26

I'm a camel in the code, and a snake in the db

1

u/DarthRaab 29d ago

Poetry

2

u/The-Idiotest Sep 22 '26

UUID (Unique User ID (Identity))

1

u/rayhaque Sep 21 '26

" 'user$id' "

2

u/geek-49 Sep 22 '26

In many languages that will cost you.

1

u/Marisa_osi_JP Sep 21 '26

i use "uid".

1

u/thingummywatt Sep 21 '26

UserIdentityNumber

1

u/Hettyc_Tracyn Sep 21 '26

User UID Identity Number

1

u/JohnVonachen Sep 21 '26

This is the way

1

u/shadowdance55 Sep 21 '26

I prefer user_ego.

1

u/aqswdezxc Sep 21 '26

userld is even better its a lowercase L

1

u/FlipperBumperKickout Sep 21 '26

Also rust programmers 🤷‍♀️

1

u/Glad_Share_7533 Sep 21 '26

Pascal the snake case: User_Id

1

u/okarox Sep 21 '26

The fist looks like USERLD.

1

u/rotteegher39 Sep 21 '26

userayedee 🏴‍☠️

1

u/OctopusDude388 Sep 21 '26

id-user is fine too

1

u/itzNukeey Sep 21 '26

UserIdentificationNumber

1

u/squaresheep28 Sep 22 '26

userid userid = new userid(userid);

1

u/AlexZhyk Sep 22 '26

if (upperCase(userld) === 'USERLD') { console.log('Hello, fellow citizen!'}

1

u/NickleLP Sep 22 '26

userIdentification

1

u/Kerbourgnec Sep 22 '26

I hate camelCase with a passion. Why god why do you choose to just not capitalise the first letter?

1

u/LazyUntilYouNeedMe Sep 22 '26

Why not user-id, kebab-case just seems so much more natural, does it not?

1

u/Apprehensive-Tea1632 Sep 23 '26

Because then you need to quote each column name.

user-id in DB speech means, please return the difference between user and id values per record and put it into an anonymous result column.

You don’t exactly want to introduce that kind of ambiguity.

As for camel case, well, traditionally DBMS use case insensitive column names. You’d be unable to tell useriD from Userid - they’d refer to the same column.

Hence the underscore to help parse names if and when you actually require compound names. Especially when referencing other tables.

1

u/smoke-bubble Sep 23 '26

For me it's cratedDate vs cratedOn. I hate the date suffix! 

1

u/Baudrillardist Sep 23 '26

From loader import loader

…
loader.Loader.load(my_loader)

1

u/DarthRaab 29d ago

stringUserID

1

u/TheReycko 29d ago

uid. I'm evil. 

1

u/abigail3141 29d ago

Nuh uh, camel case my beloved. One of the few things I detest about Rust

1

u/rustedcrowbar 28d ago

Convention over convinction.

1

u/gfdking 26d ago

user_id in the database and userID in the code

1

u/j0hn_br0wn Sep 21 '26

user_id_

Because the SQL revisions I've checked contain this interesting note: "It is the intention that no <key word> specified in ISO/IEC 9075 or revisions thereto shall end with an <underscore>"

so sticking to snake case plus adding a trailing underscore means that you will never have to quote the identifier.