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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

I did a Google search for elaboration on this and apparently there is disagreement that ISO-11179 says this at all:

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/d5f2f...

> Yes, this is the same version as I found, but the closest thing I could find to addressing table names in the paper itself was an "Object Class name", something like an OOP Class or something you'd find in a UML diagram, but not really the same as a table name, and in any case all the examples were singular.

> Was actually kinda hoping Celko would deign to comment on this himself as he seems to be the chief proponent of the "collective identifiers as specified by ISO 11179" meme.

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"To remind users that tables are sets of entities, ISO-11179 Standard likes to use collective or plural nouns that describe the set of those entities for the names of tables. Thus 'Employee' is a bad name because it is singular"

Page 10, SQL For Smarties (Celko), 5th Ed

If Celko says it's right, it's right

OK, but the ISO-11179 Standard doesn't seem to actually say that. Here's a purported copy of Part 5 -- Naming and identification principles -- of the standard (as linked to from the aforementioned MSDN forum thread:

https://www.ftb.ca.gov/aboutFTB/Projects/ITSP/Part_5_Naming_...

The word "collective" doesn't show up in the document.

The word "plural" shows up twice, both times in item #a of "Lexical rules":

> a) Nouns are used in singular form only. Verbs (if any) are in the present tense.

> NOTE In Japanese, this rule shall not be applied because of no plural form of nouns and no distinction of verb tense.

The only reference on Wikipedia to the ISO 11179 standard making that recommendation has since been deleted for being unsubstantiated:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Data_element_name...

edit: The apparently inaccurate content is talked about on the "Data element name" Talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Data_element_name

I looked for pluralization in the standard, and couldn't find it. Of course, I only glanced over the Table of Content.

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