[evanelias]

Generally speaking, table name capitalization linters are actually very useful for portability reasons.

The exact rules for identifier case sensitivity vary across different DBMS, for example in Postgres it depends on whether quotes are used: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-syntax-lexical.h...

Meanwhile for MySQL/MariaDB it depends on whether the underlying OS/filesystem is case-sensitive or not: https://www.skeema.io/blog/2022/06/07/lower-case-table-names...

And plenty of similarly weird behavior on other DBMS.

ORMs tend to be generic / multi-DBMS, and you shouldn't always assume your ORM's behavior is more qualified than a DBMS-specific linter.

[davedx]

I don't understand -- useful how exactly?

For most of my recent projects I use Prisma with Postgres; Prisma tables by default are named like TableName, and yes - for actual Postgres SQL that means you need to wrap everything in double quotes if you do anything manually `SELECT * FROM "TableName"` because otherwise it won't work.

But that's never actually been an issue for me in some way? Compared to the immense benefits of having a well designed ORM (like Prisma), this linter doesn't seem useful to me at all. But maybe I'm missing something.

[evanelias]

Sure, it depends on the circumstances of the project and company. If your company has software written in multiple languages interacting with the same database, then you're not all going through the same ORM and things like this can be problematic. That means it's useful to have a policy of "all identifiers should be lowercase", and the linter helps enforce that.

Or if you ever need to port software to multiple DBMS instead of just Postgres, then having mixed-case names is especially a minefield, since each DBMS handles this differently and very few handle things per the SQL standard in this particular area.

It's admittedly a slightly niche linter rule, and in my own schema management software (which includes a linter) I have this rule default to being disabled.

As a side note though, it's honestly a red flag when an ORM uses mixed-case names by default. Normally one benefit of ORMs is that they help with multi-DBMS portability, but this design choice absolutely does the opposite.