In a recent implementation at a client we found that they use the same field name across different tables in the database. For example "EffDate". This appears in Customer table, Service Table, Offer table etc. They are not redundant data but rather store different information specific to the table itself.

These need to be exposed to the users for various reporting. The logical business name would be Effective Date. However because there are many effective dates, across the data, we need a way identify which effective date it is. Short of doing a Table_field name format, is there another way to accomplish this? Also, because they are date fields, imagine how many of these they will be once we create "date hierarchy fields".

Any thoughts?