I recently attended DevCon2011, and am now trying to implement some of the knowledge gained from some of the panels there. In particular, I am working on integrating FM and MySQL. I am looking at doing a bi-directional synchronization strategy, or at least semi-so. Synching creation of new records should be bidirectional; record modifications should only flow FM -> MySQL. But anyway, that is secondary to my current question, which is about field naming conventions.

In one of the panel presentations (Introduction to FileMaker Pro and SQL Integration), on a slide entitled Readying your FileMaker Solution, there is some advice about field naming conventions. It suggests that you don't use underscores at the start of field names. This flies in the face of one of my conventions, as I use underscores to sort keys and such to the top of the alphabetical field list.

I'm having a hard time trying to figure out why this advice was given; as far as I'm able to tell from a few google searches, I can't find any evidence that this isn't allowed in MySQL. I am admittedly not knowledgeable about MySQL yet, so I was hoping somebody else could shed some light on this. Is there good reason to abandon my starting underscore convention, or is this recommendation made only on the sense of aesthetics of the presenter of that seminar?

Interesting. I work on projects that integrate mySQL tables, and indeed, we name our primary keys with leading double underscores and our foreign keys with single underscores: __kP_ and _kF_.

We've not had problems.

I hope someone chimes in to clarify this recommendation. Who led the session?

It was led by Paul de Hallé, of Linear Blue Ltd.

It's very possible I'm misunderstanding or misconstruing the advice...perhaps there was more said on this that I don't remember in the seminar. But just looking at the slide, it straight says Naming Conventions....no underscores at start. Just trying to make heads or tails of this statement.

From the very little I've read about this, it seems MySQL naming conventions are just as established and widely accepted as Filemaker naming conventions...

However, if you want to know about naming restrictions, it would be best to go directly to the source:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/identifiers.html