Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Data Management:
DataServer for ORACLE

Naming conventions

One factor to consider when planning for maximum compatibility across OpenEdge and ORACLE is the kind of restrictions each has for naming tables and fields.

Field and column names

These are the restrictions for naming OpenEdge fields and ORACLE columns:

OpenEdge — Field names can be up to 32 characters long and can consist of alphabetic characters (A–Z and a–z), digits (0–9), and the special characters $, &, #, %, -, and _. A field name must begin with an alphabetic character.
ORACLE — Column names can be up to 30 characters long. They can consist of the same characters as OpenEdge names, except % and -.

The set of characters that OpenEdge allows includes all of the characters ORACLE allows. The Progress-to-ORACLE utility replaces characters that ORACLE does not accept with the underscore ( _ ). For example, the OpenEdge cust-num field maps to the CUST_NUM column in ORACLE.

Table names

There can be more than one ORACLE table (or view) with the same name within a database, because ORACLE qualifies tables by owner as well as by name. OpenEdge requires unique table names.

OpenEdge resolves nonunique table names for you. When OpenEdge encounters matching table names while creating or updating a schema image, for the second and subsequent occurrence of a table name, it names the corresponding ORACLE table table-1, table-2, etc. For example, if OpenEdge encounters a second instance of a table named employee in the ORACLE database, it names the corresponding schema-holder table employee-1. The Table Properties Sheet in the Data Dictionary shows you which ORACLE table maps to the schema holder table.