Good or bad idea to include numbers in SQL table names?

Question

It's clear that you can use numeric characters in SQL table names and use them so long as they're not at the beginning. (There's a discussion here on one of the side effects: SQLite issue with Table Names using numbers?) The database I'm targetting is Oracle 10g/11g.

I'm designing a reporting database where naming some of the entities clearly is best done by describing the reports, which are named after numbers ('part 45', '102S', '401'). It's just the business domain language: these reports just aren't commonly referred to by any other name. The entities I'm modelling really are best named this way.

My question is: am I going to have difficulties with maintenance or programmability if I put numbers in a table name? I'm always worried about ancillary software around the database: drivers, ETL code that might not play nice with a non-plain-vanilla name. But there's a real benefit in intelligibility in this business domain, so am I just being squeamish?

My question put simply is: are there any 'gotchas' or corner cases that would rule out a table name like PART_45_AUDIT?

Answer 1

If PART_45_AUDIT is really the clearest description of the entity you're modeling (which would be very rare), there shouldn't be any gotchas to having numbers in the middle of a name. Putting numbers at the front of the name would be a different story because that would require using double-quoted identifiers and there are plenty of tools that don't fully support double-quoted identifiers. Plus, of course, it's rather annoying to have to type the double-quotes every time you reference the table.

CREATE TABLE "102S" (
  col1 number
);

SELECT *
  FROM "102S"