I know this is an old article but I'm glad I found it. I agree 100% for homegrown stuff. Sure, if you have to follow a given naming convention to support a 3rd party app, your hands are pretty much tied. I also don't give a hoot about ANSI compliance because truly transparent code portability is a myth and not using the advanced extensions available in each "brand" of an RDBMS is like having a scientific calculator and only using the 4 basic functions.