Commas and so on in Field names - a good idea?

[Enoch Root]

I've had a bit of a disagreement with a couple of colleagues who think it's fine to put commas and other characters in the names of database fields. I'm emphatic in my dislike of the idea, but colleagues think it's fine. Who is right?

I hasten to add that none of the three of us are database specialists, but I've spoken to a couple of SQL specialists who agree with me that it's not a good idea.

[Dan Grossman]

The comma in SQL is used to separate column names, so putting it IN the column name is a horrible idea. It's just going to lead to errors and messy troubleshooting in the future, and every single query that's written has to enclose the column names by whatever the escape character is in your RDBMS (backticks in some, square brackets in some, etc)... which also makes the SQL less portable to a different RDBMS should the company change in the future.

[wwb_99]

What Dan said. Field names should be as bog standard 7 bit ascii with no spaces as possible, you never know what some library will barf on.

[felgall]

Stick to letters, numbers, and underscores and avoid reserved words - include anything else and your code is going to only work on the one database and will require a major reqrite if you ever need to shift it to a different one. Also including other characters introduces more scope for errors in the code and so will add signficantly to testing time.