Is there any serious MySQL naming styleguide?

Question

As you can saw in Table name show a syntax error in MySQL question you can define some particular tablename ( attn-cse-a[3-1][mpms][10-8-2013] ).

A comment suggest to use only alphanumeric chars as good tablename, but this is really a wise choice? What about of "-" and "_"?

Is there any serious styleguide to MySQL naming of tables, columns, index, etc.?

I say MySQL because of big differences between DB syntax rules of SQL servers, but of course can be a generic SQL naming styleguide!

Answer 1

The MySQL Reference Manual has a pretty good description of what is allowed:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/identifiers.html

Personally I use a subset of the allowable characters for unquoted identifiers, which the manual describes as follows:

• Permitted characters in unquoted identifiers:
  • ASCII: [0-9,az,AZ$_] (basic Latin letters, digits 0-9, dollar, underscore)
  • Extended: U+0080 .. U+FFFF

Restricting that list further, I would not use any of the following in table/column names or other identifiers:

• dollar sign ($)
• extended characters
• reserved words

So basically that leaves you with alphanumeric characters and underscores, but avoid reserved words.