Table and column naming conventions when plural and singular forms are odd or the same

In my search I found mostly arguments for whether to use plurality in database naming conventions, and ways to handle it in either case. I have decided I prefer plural table names, so I don't want to argue that.

I need to represent an animal's species and genus and so on in a database. The plural and singular form for 'species' are the same, and the plural of 'genus' is 'genera'.

I'm using Microsoft's Entity Data Model, by the way. My concern is mainly about whether I'll have problems later on depending on my naming choices.

I think I can get by with:开发者_高级运维 Table: Genera | Column: Genus

But I'm unsure how I should handle: Table: Species | Column: Species

If I really wanted to be lazy about this I'd just name them 'species > specie' and 'genuses > genus', but I would prefer to read them in their correct forms.

Any advice would be appreciated.

I would go for Genera/Genus and Species/Species. That's how you say it in English, so why using an incorrect form of the word?

I generally avoid have a column name that is the same as a table name because it can be confusing to human readers. The database engine knows whether it expects a table name or column name in any given context, I don't recall that ever being a problem. (Is there some context where either would be valid? I can't think of one.)

That said, if you run into this issue, it indicates to me that you have a poorly chosen name for one or the other. Species makes good sense as a table name: this table contains data about a species. So if a field in that table is called "species" ... what about the species? Presumably everything in the table is about a species. I'd guess it was probably some sort of identifier and not, say, the number of chromosomes or method of reproduction. But is it an ID number? An abbreviation? The common name? The binomial nomenclature name? Etc. If it's, say, the common name, I'd call it "common_name" and not "species".

By the way, another naming convention you should decide on is whether column names that could be ambiguous if taken out of context should have names that specify the context, or whether you use the table name to eliminate the ambiguity. For example, you could have many things that have a "name". You could call any such field simply "name", and if there's ambiguity, qualify it, like "species.name", "laboratory.name", etc. Or you could give each field a unique name, like "species_name", "laboratory_name", etc. That's one of those questions that I think has no definitively right answer, just pros and cons and make a decision and be consistent.