Database capitalisation naming conventions

Operating systems such as Linux are case sensitive, but Windows is not. Therefore it is not possible to preserve case sensitivity on a Windows server. Generally, while I would favour [CamelCase] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CamelCase) as a convention in principle, and this would work for the operating system nextSIS was originally installed on with the appropriate case enforcing code, if a person moves databases between platforms case information can still be lost and the system cannot run. Because of this, all entities, tables and attributes are presented here in lowercase, and this lowercase naming convention will be maintained and enforced throughout the system to maintain interoperability. Consequently, I am using underscores to separate entity and attribute names to enhance readability.

Generally, with the use of underscores I've tried to follow the principle that they indicate the separation between tables. Some separated English words, such as 'grading scale' - which is a description of a singular object - are joined as 'gradingscale'.