I'll further focus on one point in the post: The author took it as a given that the code with short column names was "less readable". Why? Surely he wasn't repe

I'll further focus on one point in the post: The author took it as a given that the code with short column names was "less readable". Why? Surely he wasn't repeating the literal field names again and again in the code? In the last DB-intensive project I worked on, we used constants in the code that had to deal with column names. This was extremely useful when changing our database schema -- no names to hunt down and change, just change the name in the one place it was used in the code. In this case, this method gives you both a readable name in your code and a short name to repeat in the DB. Just a thought.