concatenating the names of two tables is a bad practice, generally speaking. It's lazy and it doesn't really describe the purpose of the table. If you do concatenate two table names, don't do it alphabetically. This is just bad advice. One table is likely the principal in the relationship and the other is a dependent table. I would think that you should state the principal first followed by the dependent. It would be a better idea to create a name that describes the nature of the relationship between the two tables. In this example, I'm guessing that we are storing the books written by a given author. I guess we need a many-to-many relationship in case of co-authors. In this case the table would be author_bibliography would be a much better name for the table. As your application continues to evolve, it's likely that you'll add additional columns to describe the relationship, or even a reference to another table. What happens then? Will you rename the table to include the new table in alphabetical order? Yikes!