I asked on Twitter about naming database tables. It goes without saying that Twitter polls are extremely scientific and a trustworthy tool for decision making.

I fall firmly into the plural camp, but the other day I was setting up a many-to-many relationship in Hasura and was struggling with the documentation, even though I’ve made plenty of join tables in the past. After leaving work, still thinking about it, it dawned on me that all their documentation had singular table names. I couldn’t believe it. “Surely, this is illegal?” I thought.

Then I started checking my own assumptions. It’s not likely, but maybe I am the one who’s wrong here…

I’m fairly certain that I picked this behavior up from using Rails and CakePHP from forever ago. Those frameworks and their conventions enforce plural table names. Somewhere along the way I convinced myself that this is the “correct” way to do it. It makes sense that a table of multiple Article objects would be called articles. It even reads well if you look at the SQL…

SELECT * FROM articles WHERE...

If you work with databases long enough you hit some edges of this dogma. Mass nouns like “evidence” or “research” don’t pluralize well and chip away at your perfect cathedral. Singular table names have an advantage here for sure.

Taking it a step further, Dhimas Widrayato makes a great observation that entire premise of my question is rather Anglo-centric…

Languages like Japanese, Malaysian, Javanese, and Indonesian repeat the noun to make it plural. For Dhimas and millions of others, repeating a noun for a database table name would be a superficial improvement…

…and so is maybe an s…
…or es…
…or changing us to i…
…or suffixing mass nouns with _items.

Let’s be honest, English is a hot mess.

I don’t know if I’m converted to the singular camp, but this whole episode did challenge my preconceived notions. That’s fun. For this project, I think I’m going to try singular and see if I hate it. It probably will matter 1% in the long run.