Why is prefixing column names considered bad practice?

Posted by P.Brian.Mackey on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by P.Brian.Mackey
Published on 2011-06-20T19:09:47Z Indexed on 2012/09/26 15:50 UTC
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According to a popular SO post is it considered a bad practice to prefix table names. At my company every column is prefixed by a table name. This is difficult for me to read. I'm not sure the reason, but this naming is actually the company standard. I can't stand the naming convention, but I have no documentation to back up my reasoning.

All I know is that reading AdventureWorks is much simpler. In ~~this~~ our company DB you will see a table, Person and it might have column name:

Person_First_Name
or maybe even
Person_Person_First_Name (don't ask me why you see person 2x)

Why is it considered a bad practice to pre-fix column names? Are underscores considered evil in SQL as well?

Note: I own Pro SQL Server 2008 - Relation Database design and implementation. References to that book are welcome.

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Developer IT

Why is prefixing column names considered bad practice? - Developer IT

Why is prefixing column names considered bad practice?

sql

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