Survey: What do you name your User table?

Most of the sites that I build have to deal with security at some
point, and this means that somewhere in the database there needs to be
a list of Users.

The naming convention that I (and most everybody I've ever worked with
that cares about such things) use dictates that a table should be named
according to what it contains, and that this name should be singular.
So, Customer, User, Entry are all good, while Customers, Users, Entries
are not so good. Thus, nobody has to deal with Junior Dev Jimmy's
magic ID generation code that occasionally tries to bind a column to
"EntrieID".

The issue I keep running into is that "User" is essentially a reserved
word in ASP.NET, being a property of Page. Thus, I can't use it as the
ClassName for my DataObject that wraps the User table. Thus, I
probably shouldn't be naming the table "User", since every other
DataObject always is named after the table it represents.

I've tried going with "Login" to describe users, but this usually
crashes into somebody's Login.aspx Page object, and besides it's not
quite descriptive enough for my tastes.

That leaves us with "Users" (thus breaking our naming convention),
"tblUser" "UserTable" or "UserRecord" (which all look silly on the
url), "Individual" or "Dude" (which I've actually gone with in the
past).

I'm curious what other people have come up with to attack this problem.
I'm sure I'm not the only one running into it. Let me know what you
think!


Jason Kester
Expat Software Consulting Services
http://www.expatsoftware.com/

 

because tables are sets, i (like the sqlserver dev group) always make them
pural, so my users table name is Users. in your case UserInfo is probably a
good name.

-- bruce (sqlwork.com)

 

UserProfile, UserRegistrationInfo, RegisteredUsers, UserCredentials....

Johm

 

Dude, AppUser, Account, Credential, Operator.
I just read that someone once named it the Dude table. Before that, I used AppUser or Account, but I like Dude better, because it won't conflict with anything, is short (same length as User), AppUser is two words which makes some things awkward looking, and Account might conflict with customer account or bank account in some apps. You might use the name Credential, which shouldn't conflict with most database applications. Credential would be an especially good name for the password table, if you keep separate tables, because Password is also a keyword in many places. A user operates your application, so Operator might be good. However, since I work too often with people who are lavish followers of the big gorilla (Microsoft), rather than thorough logic, I sometimes cave in to calling it the Users table, since that is the Microsoft default name for such a thing, even if all of my other table names are singular.