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In our dev group we have a raging debate regarding the naming convention for Primary and Foreign Keys. There's basically two schools of thought in our group: 1: Primary Table (Employee) Primary Key is called ID Foreign table (Event) Foreign key is called EmployeeID or 2: Primary Table (Employee) Primary Key is called EmployeeID Foreign table (Event) Foreign key is called EmployeeID I prefer not to duplicate the name of the table in any of the columns (So I prefer option 1 above). Conceptually, it is consistent with a lot of the recommended practices in other languages, where you don't use the name of the object in its property names. I think that naming the foreign key EmployeeID (or Employee_ID might be better) tells the reader that it is the ID column of the Employee Table. Some others prefer option 2 where you name the primary key prefixed with the table name so that the column name is the same throughout the database. I see that point, but you now can not visually distinguish a primary key from a foreign key. Also, I think it's redundant to have the table name in the column name, because if you think of the table as an entity and a column as a property or attribute of that entity, you think of it as the ID attribute of the Employee , not the EmployeeID attribute of an employee. I don't go an ask my coworker what his PersonAge or PersonGender is. I ask him what his Age is. So like I said, it's a raging debate and we go on and on and on about it. I'm interested to get some new perspectives.

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