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Naming can be very hard to standardize on as everyone has their own way of naming variables, columns, tables, and etc. Many times, there are way too many rules to remember. I am going to propose what I think is a consistent way of naming.

History: If you look at history of naming objects back to the mainframe days. There were physical constraints that designers had to live with. Today, you would never name a column FN (first name) as it is too cryptic. But, when storage was very expensive, it was done. Many systems had restrictions on number of characters. In the early days, the limit was up to 6. Even the first version of dBase had a limit of 8 characters. I remember one system that didn't use ASCII and they could save a bit or two by only having upper case letters.

Today, we really don't have physical constraints. Most systems allow 256 character names. Some even allow Unicode characters. Oracle is the only exception to the rule.

What do you think of these examples: FIRSTNAME, FIRST_NAME, firstname, first_name, First_Name, FirstName, firstName. How about these: FrstNm, FstNme, fn, FN, Fn. I am sure you have picked out your favorite.

Before we have a standard, we have to look at the development language. Is the language case sensitive? Java and c++ are. PHP and ASP are not. If the language is case sensitive, many developers like to have all of the names in lower case (firstname) or proper case (FirstName) or the modified proper case (firstName).

Should the development language drive the naming convention for databases? The answer is maybe. It might be easier to have a standard that will work across all development efforts.

What ever you decide to be your standard, just be consistent.