20 Database Design Best Practices

1. Use well defined and consistent names for tables and columns (i.e. School, StudentCourse, CourseID ...).
2. Use singular for table names (i.e. use StudentCourse instead of StudentCourses). Table represents a collection of entities, there is no need for plural names.
3. Don’t use spaces for table names. Otherwise you will have to use ‘{‘, ‘[‘, ‘“’ etc. characters to define tables (i.e. for accesing table Student Course you'll write “Student Course”. StudentCourse is much better).
4. Don’t use unnecessary prefixes or suffixes for table names (i.e. use School instead of TblSchool, SchoolTable etc.).
5. Keep passwords as encrypted for security. Decrypt them in application when required.
6. Use integer id fields for all tables. If id is not required for the time being, it may be required in the future (for association tables, indexing ...).
7. Choose columns with the integer data type (or its variants) for indexing. varchar column indexing will cause performance problems.
8. Use bit fields for boolean values. Using integer or varchar is unnecessarily storage consuming. Also start those column names with “Is”.
9. Provide authentication for database access. Don’t give admin role to each user.
10. Avoid “select *” queries until it is really needed. Use "select [required_columns_list]" for better performance.
11. Use an ORM (object relational mapping) framework (i.e. hibernate, iBatis ...) if application code is big enough. Performance issues of ORM frameworks can be handled by detailed configuration parameters.
12. Partition big and unused/rarely used tables/table parts to different physical storages for better query performance.

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