The following is an example of a poorly named table from a major backup software vendor. This caused failures with the regular maintenance which was being run.

That table was called Media_Views.UpdateMaxCleaningCount.

Notice the period in the table name.

SQL Servers full object naming convention is servername.databasename.schemaname.objectname.

In this case the table actually had a period in the table name so it became a five part naming structure, which caused errors.

There are lots of resources for SQL Server naming conventions and best practices, most of them state not to have periods in object names.

Other poor object naming that we have come across include:

• a table named ‘View’

• a database named ‘Convert’

You should also avoid using reserved words when creating your database and objects within a database.