Re: Can column name aliases be supported?

On 08/23/2012 11:56 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 8:19 AM, Gauthier, Dave <dave.gauthier@intel.com> wrote:
>> I have a table with a column called "last_name".  I have one customer who
>> likes to articulate queries and updates for this using column name
>> "last_name" (no problem there) but another who likes to call it "lname" and
>> yet another who likes to call it "surname".    So 3 different names for the
>> same physical column in the table.
>
> Here's an out-of-the-box suggestion.
>
> Drop the column altogether and have a single column "name". Trying to
> divide names up never works properly. Does "surname" mean family name?
> Not all cultures put the family name last. Is "last_name" simply the
> part of the name after the last space?

+1 to that, and it gets way worse:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

and while you're at it, read this:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

--
Craig Ringer