How are database columns named?Let's take the example of an entity which class name is MyObject with a method getSomeAttribute. This field will have a column named SOME_ATTRIBUTE. The naming convention is simply that we take the name of the field according to Java Beans convention, separated with _ and all upper case.
Foreign key columns follow the same convention, but end with _ID. Using the same example of SomeAttribute, the column name would be SOME_ATTRIBUTE_ID.
You can also specify the column name you'd like to use through either the net.java.ao.Accessor or net.java.ao.Mutator annotation. Note that the value defined in the annotation will still be processed in the same way a method name would be processed.
So if you set the value as SomeAttribute, the column will be named SOME_ATTRIBUTE.
Column names (once transformed) can not be more than 30 characters long. This is an Oracle restriction that is take in account whatever database one works with to provide consistency across all supported databases.
Further more (transformed) column names cannot use any of the following reserved words: BLOB, CLOB, NUMBER, ROWID, TIMESTAMP, VARCHAR2.
This also applies to trigger names and sequence names, which are used by Oracle 11g to emulate autoincrement for primary keys (ids) for Active Objects.
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