Blog

Qualify your table name

September 28, 2007

Thanks to Tim for reminding me what a headache this can be!

I’m guilty of creating SQL statements like so:

SELECT testfield FROM sometable

Today that caused a real problem. An error that was incredibly difficult to find.

The error message was:

11 >= 11 null

Seriously, that was the error message displayed by Coldfusion.

The answer was that we should’ve qualified the table name like so:

SELECT testfield FROM [sometable]

You can take it a step further and do this for your columns as well. I usually do not qualify my column names unless it’s necessary, but qualifying your table name is easy and may save your hair.