"Jim" <jim.gaull@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:649ac820-136e-4a04-a74c-2edec37b4bcd@u69g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
> Hi all,
>
> I'm working on my first data warehouse and I'm not sure how I should
> name the columns in the database.

<snip/>

> My question is am I better off naming my columns the same as the
> source system's short name so that I can easily debug problems later?
> Should I instead try to shorten their definition into something
> meaningful? On a side note, I'm 100% positive that we'll never
> populate the tables in questions with data from an additional source.

I concur with John K. Use descriptive names, especially when looking down
the road if you're planning to build data marts from your data warehouse. A
lot of client applications expose the column names to business users, so
it's a good idea to keep the column names in the data marts descriptive so
that business users will not be confused. By the same token, since many
client tools expose the column names to users, try not to make the names too
long. I've run into problems with nondescriptive column names and too-long
column names with tools like ProClarity on the front end. From a technical
perspective it makes administration and troubleshooting easier if your
column names are somewhat human-readable.