Thanks every one for taking time to read the article and commenting on same.

Here are few of my thoughts.

David: Thanks for giving the inputs. The sp_ naming convention is sometimes commonly seen with developers and we have learnt a bit hard way in last couple of years and now we do have a naming conventions which takes care of this. What Ferguson we have gone through the grind of developing and implementing the naming conventions and implementing the same in our environment. I agree with Adam on his suggestion that Varchar should be judiciously used only when the Character field is fairly long. Probably I got biased by my learnings as I have only come accross cases on the other extreme in which large fields have been given Char.

JWINER: As far as moving our development to separate development environment is concerned, we have considered it for some of assignments in which the development cycle is long enough. Typically to give you an idea of our organisation, we conduct lot of HR Surveys which have huge amount of data and both data and Analysis varies from survey to survey. Our environment does not fit very well into either typical OLTP or OLAP environment. However we do have some certain set of techniques and VB Components, data structures available which we customise to suit our requirements. Some of the standard surveys also are in single system and single database system in which case we do follow a process of making changes on development and porting to production but for some application which are on the fly we really don't have that luxury.