When you make your first Yii application… A good place to start, among all other reference material, is the Yii Code Conventions, and pay heed: deviating from the guidelines CAN CAUSE YOU REAL problems in your application. A good tip for developers new to Yii, and a case in point, is Case. The Conventions (IMO) are not worded strongly enough! To steer the developer new to Yii away from making decisions that will break a Yii (v1.1) application , it can’t be stressed enough in the case of table and field naming in the database and that the case naming applied to table and column names has a bearing on the initial success or refactoring of a project. While it is quite clear from the Coding Convention that lower case is ‘proposed’.. in fact.. a choice here to use Sentence Case or to use camelCase will break some key features offered by Yii… Including, but not limited to Gii scaffold generator or the wildly useful Giix extension To the extent that these tools will work.. In all likelihood foreign key constraints used to define relationships will either not be identified, or the resulting controller and model files will not accord. In addition to this, many contributed extension will assume you have adopted lowercase naming and will simply break without it. So the take away is.. When you look at the Yii Coding Conventions on offer… It really is, an offer you can’t refuse… unless you want to get hurt down the line.