Hacker News Reader

Comment by arnaudsm | Hacker News Reader

My other favorite best practice with SQL is to have unique ID column names, so you never mix up IDs, and can use JOIN with the USING syntax:

  SELECT *
  FROM customer
  JOIN order USING (customer_id)

I've never heard of `using` syntax. And now you might make me reconsider my identifier naming usage :) It certainly makes sense.

The downside of this is GORM ( or new developer ) often just default to "id". Fighting against it will take away bits of your attention and effort.

Yep, it's unfortunately the industry standard, but in my career I've seen it lead to mixing up ids and painful debugging.

My reason for doing this is that there can be multiple foreign key columns pointing at the same table, each with a distinct purpose and name.

The general case is a named key.