topic Re: Best Practices for naming Tables and Databases in Databricks in Data Engineering

Best Practices for naming Tables and Databases in Databricks

Spauk — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 13:38:28 GMT

We moved in Databricks since few months from now, and before that we were in SQL Server.

So, all our tables and databases follow the "camel case" rule.

Apparently, in Databricks the rule is "lower case with underscore".

Where can we find an official documentation that says that, to show it to our management please?

Because without this doc, they never let us change a thing.

Thanks.

Re: Best Practices for naming Tables and Databases in Databricks

Hubert-Dudek — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 13:46:43 GMT

I think it is up to your decision. I prefer lowercase but actually companies for which I am working are not using them in databricks.

Re: Best Practices for naming Tables and Databases in Databricks

LandanG — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:09:24 GMT

Hi @Salah KHALFALLAH , looking at the documentation it appears that Databricks' preferred naming convention is lowercase and underscores as you mentioned.

The reason for this is most likely because Databricks uses Hive Metastore, which is case insensitive, so querying "MyTable" is the same as "mytable" and "MYTABLE" and will be displayed as "mytable" in the data browser window, so camel case may not be that helpful when naming objects.

Re: Best Practices for naming Tables and Databases in Databricks

Hubert-Dudek — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:22:19 GMT

@Landan George You are right, so naming everything in lowercase and low dash is the only method that makes sense. @Salah KHALFALLAH maybe you can use that document https://api-docs.databricks.com/rest/latest/unity-catalog-api-specification.html as there is written :

"Names supplied by users are converted to lower-case by DBR clients (before they are sent to the UC API) . Also, input names (for all object types except Table Column Names) are converted to lower-case by the UC server, to handle the case that UC objects are created via directly accessing the UC API. With this conversion to lower-case names, the name handling is effectively case-insensitive. I.e., if a user creates a table with relative name “******”, it would conflict with an existing table named “******”."

Re: Best Practices for naming Tables and Databases in Databricks

LandanG — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:29:37 GMT

@Hubert Dudek That's a good link, thanks for adding it

Re: Best Practices for naming Tables and Databases in Databricks

Spauk — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:36:05 GMT

Thank you very much!