Phil,

I frequently hang on your every word. This is a place where I disagree. I am a dreaded developer, but I am also a part-time SQL DBA and have been for many years. I've NEVER done a serious conversion from MS Access to SQL (as your Editorial suggests), however, I have always been, and remain somewhat of an adherent to hungarian notation...

Microsoft has backed off of it, and for good reason, in some areas, but I don't totally agree with their retreat. Hungarian notation had it's place, and whatever the replacement might be, it will have its place. In general, I don't religiously use Hungarian notation for variable names OR [especially] column names (when you see it in column names, that is, to me a clear sign of a database ported from MS Access to MS SQL!).

I do believe that most DATABASES (something most people don't do!) should be prefixed with a "db", most tables should be prefixed with a "tbl" and most stored procedures (which I won't personally do db CRUD without) should be prefixed with "sp". Sticking to this standard makes things so much easier for full time developers like myself to try to track down issues, especially in XML generated by .NET and in VB projects written before .NET existed. (You don't have to search for every "Vendor" occurrence, but only the "tblVendor" occurrences!).

I would NEVER prefix column names however, but I've certainly "lived" in environments where that was common -- due to MS Access roots....

On top of that, on a typical day, I work on 3-6 different clients' systems. One of my better clients had someone that hadn't heard of any of these things, or at least filtered them through too many people before implementing them... Instead I have poorly named [hard to find] databases with similarly named [hard to find] tables. Additionally, to follow the lead of Microsoft, _I guess_, they prefixed ALL of their stored procedures (well over 500) with sp_... We all know what that means....

Anyway, that is my 42 cents. Sorry so long, but I do have some strong opinions here. I predominantly develop in C#, and I really don't use Hungarian notation in most of that code (unless I really think it will help document that code for the next guy.