Editorials

Naming Conventions, With a Twist

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Naming Conventions, With a Twist
Sandra
wrote in to the discussion list with a great question – "I really hate naming things: service accounts, servers, instances… Mostly because we don’t really have a consistent standard here. But, lately, we’re moving toward more clusters, more consolidated/multi-instance installations, etc… and I find myself having to name SQL instances more often. Has anyone come up with a good naming convention at this level that they’d like to share. I find a lot about naming conventions for T-SQL but that’s not what I’m looking for."

…and Tom Roush wrote back with his experiences – and suggestions. "Here’s a run down of some of the things I’ve seen in the past….

Instance Names:
Recently I’ve seen some kind of acronym in instance names to represent the application that’s running. This doesn’t necessarily mean you can find out what application is running based on that – but it’s kind of a ‘once you’ve been told, it makes sense’. Just like a password – make it make sense to you, and confuse the rest of the world.

Machine Names:
I’ve often seen machine names that involve some indication of location and function. Example: a number of years ago I worked on a test case management (TCM) machine in what was known as the “Saturn” datacenter. The machine name started off SATCM – and then a bunch of other alphabet soup I don’t remember. I think it might have been something like SATCMSQL… (it’s safe to say this because the machine and that naming convention are long, long gone)

Now – given that that was pretty specific in letting us know where the box was – that might be an issue. We had one naming convention at a place I worked that had the name of the company running the datacenter – so those machines were EX-….

Problem was, when another vendor took over the datacenter, those machine names instantly became obsolete.

I used to like having SQL in the name of SQL boxes, but I can very much see that that could easily be a liability now, so that doesn’t happen anymore.

Another tack was something that could make things quite a bit easier if you’ve got machines globally – and that was having the 3 letter code of the nearest major airport as part of the servername.

Example:
Machines in or near San Francisco would have SFO in the name of the machine. Boxes near Washington, DC, might be named for Dulles International airport – which has a 3 letter acronym of IAD… (don’t ask, I don’t know)

While this doesn’t tell anyone who shouldn’t know what datacenter it’s in – it does narrow it down to *a* datacenter near a particular airport. It also doesn’t lock you down to some datacenter vendor’s name. The rest of the names of these boxes were fairly obscure, so after awhile we were able to figure things out.

Service Accounts:
This one has always been a curious one for me. I’ve seen things like svc_foo – as in – prepending svc in front of the account name foo to help sort the account names. I’ve also seen account names where there’s a name, followed by the environment the account is for – example: DBA_test, or DBA_dev, etc…

I too am curious to see what others think on this."

Do you have a naming convention approach? Drop me an email, let me know how you do it

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