>1) Column names should be fully qualified whenever possible for future scalability and performance reasons. Yes, it's tedious to always add the server.tablename prefix, but if you ever have to connect to another database and/or server, it will be INSTANTLY beneficial. Plus it's self-documenting. This eliminates the need to prefix column names with abbreviations (and removes the potential for running out of two & three-letter combinations).

I use a column prefix because it avoids a name conflict (SELECT customer.fullname, salemen.fullname ...) without changing field names with the AS clause. Plus, when you get in the resulting cursor, it becomes easy to know where that field came from (cuFullname, slFullname).