A place I worked did something that was at first extremely annoying, but later made a lot of sense -- prefix all the column names of the table with the table name.

So for a table 'user' you would have: user_id, user_name, user_password, etc. Some tables would have ridiculous long column names.

So what is this good for? First off, joins. If you had a 'post' table and a foreign key back to user_id, the naming scheme was: post_userid. So a join would be: "select from post inner join user on user_id = post_userid". There is no need to alias either table. Also, if both tables have the same field, say both have a 'note' field, it is clear which note you are accessing and there are no ambiguous issues (since one table is post_note and the other is user_note).