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Comment by elchief | Hacker News Reader

"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

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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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