>Maybe it's different for different applications (in the big sense of that word), but I couldn't ever imagine letting users directly at tables or see field names directly. Must be a side-effect of my little "vertical market app" world.

Well, I work in what you might call a "horizontal" market :) Users have apps like Crystal, where they can access (readonly) multiple data sources to do queries & reports. The more straightforward the field names, the easier it is to do your work (I'll include myself here as a sometimes user, too). And let me add that there can be a space problem with that convention in displays like grid headers -- you're losing 3 spaces of real estate to a naming convention, which can add up, besides not looking too nice.

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>If Idid have a need to let users direclty at it, I certainly wouldn't want one to get at it whose brain got scrambled from a two letter prefix!

No disagreement, but it's readonly data, so even if they're not rocket scientists, we're okay :)