Echoes from the field 10 - What's in a name?

I always say that one of the things that I love about consulting or mentoring work is that I see things (mostly code) that I would have never have thought of.

Sometimes, it’s good information where I learn a new technique that I hadn’t considered. But most times, it’s just something weird that a client has done.

GUID Table Names

A good example of this was a site where every table had a GUID name. Yes, I’m talking about tables with names like:

 SELECT * FROM dbo.[3B38AB7E-FB80-4E56-9E5A-6ECED7A8FA17];

and so on.

I suppose I should have been surprised that I’d never seen that at a site before. Their justification was that they had rolled their own type of temporal table, and before you accessed any table, you first looked up the name of the table you needed, from another table.

In the end, it worked ok, but the real challenge was that they had tens of thousands of tables named this way. I was working with query plans, and I have to say, they were basically completely unreadable.

Database File Path Database Names

Another favorite was a site where the databases were named by the location of the mdf file on the disk. Yes, they had a database named as follows:

USE [X:\Database Files\Data Files\CoreDB.mdf];
GO

Doing maintenance work with database names like this was challenging, and it certainly was testing how well all the database tools were parsing names.

These things work but…

I often explain in training that you could spend all day dreaming up bizarre ideas and never come close to the ones that I just happen to come across when reviewing client code.

2026-03-01