Naming standards are very good things. Common abbreviations are very good things.

Very good things can, however, be taken to silly extremes. We've got a logical modeling team tasked with, along with maintaining an enterprise logical model, establishing naming conventions. Unfortunately, these people work in the ethereal world of logical modeling, exclusively. They don't have to write code against the models they create, so naming every single table in a database Policy...* is not a problem for them even when we're talking about a couple of hundred tables, all inside a database named Policy. Establishing incomprehensible abbreviations like 'ddltbl' for deductible (do abbreviations generally add letters? note the new 'l') doesn't seem to slow down their work at all. The rest of us, dba's and developers, have been driven insane trying to get them to use an abbreviation like 'org' for organization instead of 'orgntzn'. I have, on more than one occasion, brought a dictionary over to their desk and pointed at common abbreviations defined with along with a word to no avail.

Don't get me wrong. I am in favor of practing a common approach. Just make sure the common approach makes sense.

Oh, and underscores in object names suck.