Naming tables using middle dot in MYSQL?

Question

Could it cause problems to name a table using middle dots, like this:

tbl_prod·prov;

Yes, it could. It's likely to hurt your reputation as a developer if someone else takes a look at your database/code in the future. (It's also time to ditch the long-outdated `tbl_` naming convention.) — ceejayoz, Jun 07 '18 at 16:48
@ceejayoz, That is a very arrogant and subjective point of view, which I do not think can be considered good practice either. As far as I know, not everyone uses the same conventions in a strict manner, but adapts them in the way that they consider most appropriate, right? Thank you anyway ;) — oxk4r, Jun 07 '18 at 17:21
My standard for code is that it should generate as few "what the fuck?"s as possible. Seeing a middot used in a table name would most certainly increment the count. `tbl_` in a table name is less of a "WTF" and more of a . It's just redundant. — ceejayoz, Jun 07 '18 at 17:26

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 07 '18 at 17:08

The rules are explained at Schema Object Names:

Identifiers are converted to Unicode internally. They may contain these characters:

Permitted characters in unquoted identifiers:

ASCII: [0-9,a-z,A-Z$_] (basic Latin letters, digits 0-9, dollar, underscore)

Extended: U+0080 .. U+FFFF

Permitted characters in quoted identifiers include the full Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), except U+0000:

ASCII: U+0001 .. U+007F

Extended: U+0080 .. U+FFFF

ASCII NUL (U+0000) and supplementary characters (U+10000 and higher) are not permitted in quoted or unquoted identifiers.

Identifiers may begin with a digit but unless quoted may not consist solely of digits.

Database, table, and column names cannot end with space characters.

The · character is U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT so it fits the definition for Extended in quoted identifiers.

Said that, I can think of two potential problems:

Object names sometimes needs to be mapped to filesystem objects. We can speculate that MySQL has done things right in all supported platforms but it makes me feel uneasy.
If you happen to run a SQL query in a client/connection that's not correctly configured, or you paste the query from the clipboard, you risk using the wrong character.

Thank you, @Álvaro González. Very useful information :) – oxk4r Jun 07 '18 at 17:23 — oxk4r, Jun 07 '18 at 17:23

Naming tables using middle dot in MYSQL?

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