Andy, I too am really looking forward to this series. I have never seen hungarian notation used in column names. I do agree it would be a disaster! The practice I use with columns is to append part of the table name to the column (except foreign keys). The classic Employee table is a good example. The column names might be empID, empLastName, empFirstName, etc. When working on tables I always keep a copy of the data dictionary handy and that's how I determine the data type and domain of the field. It also helps (a BP of course) to have data standards. So e.g. if zip code is always a 9 character text field, any time I see zip code, I know the data type. Of course, this doesn't always work with legacy databases.

Anyway, keep up the good work!