In the environment where I work today, we have a database called SECURITY. This makes me want to physically harm someone from time to time.

At my last company, our “Access developer” loved to create tables in the test environment that used reserved words as columns. When he went to move things to production, he’d send me the table creation script to run in Production. (Remember, developers don’t touch production.) I’d send it back telling him that I wouldn’t create objects in a production environment that used reserved words as column names. He’d get all upset because he’d have to rewrite code. After our bosses met several times, I finally came up with the solution. If he had a table creation script, why not plug it into SQL Management Studio. If it turned any color other than black, I was probably going to complain about it.

And if I have to put square brackets around any object name when I’m writing queries, that means someone hasn’t done their job very well, and I’m going to be cranky. And you don’t want to work with me when I’m being cranky.