It seems that everyone has an opinion on naming conventions. Microsoft even has a few recommendations. You would think with 256 (or 128 or 30) characters it would be simple to devise an apt system for describing database objects.

SELECT TYPE_NAME(system_type_id) [base_type], max_length FROM sys.types WHERE name = ‘SYSNAME’;

Of course, we might not want to use our screen real estate on object explorer. We also might not want to use that real estate up for a single column name (especially if that column was a bit flag). Fortunately, we have options. In addition to being able to use management studio to filter objects, we can us schemas to group objects and alias data types to categorize.

An example case for using schemas might be to create separate schemas for staging updates and deletes in a CDC based warehouse loads. An example for using alias data types might be differentiate between date types that are application data and date types that are row level metadata (e.g. inserted or updated date).