Naming conventions for MySQL tables

Question

I would like to get some opinions since I am thinking about creating structure for my new application and I am struggling with names for tables so I thought maybe you can give me some ideas. App has users and users can create projects while projects can have multiple keywords. So users are in one-to-many relationship with projects and projects are in many-to-many relationships with tags.

So having table users I suppose projects table should be users_projects . But what about keywords? Should it be users_projects_keywords ? And what about pivot table since I think it is kinda bad to name it like users_projects_to_users_projects_keywords or something like that. I would be grateful for a tips.

Edit: I always thought that one-to-many relationships should be called like x_y where y belongs to x. Is it not a good practice ?

Answer 1

I would have users , projects , keywords , project_keywords . I would use foreign keys to define the relationships between the tables. For example, projects would have a column such as createdby_userid , referring to the users.user_id column.

Answer 2

One idea:

There could be three dictionaries:

• Table users should have id and other data.
• Table projects as well.
• And so table keywords .

Then you create "linking" (relations) tables:

• users_projects with column id, id_user, id_project
• projects_keywords with id, id_project, id_keyword

EDIT : Maybe it indeed would be rational to include id_user into table projects as mentioned by @Laurence.