: Why do some hosting companies restrict the allowed characters in DB names? GoDaddy allows nothing but letters and numbers in database names. Other hosting companies have similar restrictions. Could

@Cugini213

There can be several explanations.

One of them is security. It's definitely safer to disallow any kind of special character that might eventually be misinterpreted during a query. Of course, the best way (from the end-user perspective) would be to allow these characters and safe escape/quote them, but this behavior increases the risk a developer might actually forget to do so compromising the system.

On the other side, you have to remember you are in a shared environment. Characters like _ or - are often used internally for specify conventions. Let me show you an example.

Let's assume that your username in GoDaddy is 345678 and you are creating a mysite database. GoDaddy might decide to compose the final database as 345678_mysite and stick with this convention internally in its routing infrastructure. Allowing you to use the internal separator in your database name might actually invalidate its internal conventions where the database is USERNAME_DATABASE.

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@YK1175434

This isn't really a programming question, and you would be better off asking the hosting provider, but here's my take.

I really couldn't tell you, to be honest. If you think about it though, you're moreso referring to a shared hosting environment, which is not designed to cater to the tech savvy. Shared hosting and the tools provided for it are moreso catered to non-technical people who need something easy to manage at an affordable rate. When you start throwing in non-alphanumeric characters (non-A-Z0-9) those type of people tend to be overwhelmed, and it often creates more frustration for both the customer, and for customer service when trying to provide assistance. I know it sounds silly that someone would be overwhelmed by more flexibility, but its true, it happens in the real world with clients.

Often times, these restrictions are put in place for simplicity for the end user. However, for us technical people who rely on things like dedicated servers more, we don't have such restrictions in that environment because we manage it ourselves, and the hosting provider doesn't really have to provide much support, nor tools.

I suppose you could just toss an email to GoDaddy or some other hosting provider and ask, and they might be able to provide an answer, or maybe not. Generally speaking customer service for hosting providers is basic, to say the least. (Unless you have a good provider like GearHost where the developers themselves provide support), or some other non-mainstream provider. They tend to provide the level of support that is sufficient for the average person, whereas technical people are more expected to be self-sufficient with their services.

As for MySQL allowing almost any character, I think its really bad practice and a bad design decision on the MySQL team. Take this for instance:

new_schema.&^


The actual name on the file system will be encoded:

new_schema@002e@0026@005e


While its neat that you can do this, its still bad practice. If its not a character supported in a file name of the Windows File System, it shouldn't be allowed. Just, horrid design in that case. Cool, more flexibile, but horrid and unnecessary.

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@Steve110

Could there be any technical motivation behind this?


Very likely - in theory, mySQL database names can contain almost any character, but as they are stored as folders on filesystem level, I can see why one would want to prevent "complicated" naming schemes, especially in a mass hosting environment with thousands of customers.

One could argue that the underscore would be a harmless and useful extension to this, though. Do GoDaddy not allow even underscores?

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