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Model classnames are singular and CamelCased. Person, BigPerson, and ReallyBigPerson are all examples of conventional model names.

Table names corresponding to CakePHP models are plural and underscored. The underlying tables for the above mentioned models would be people, big_people, and really_big_people, respectively.

Foreign keys in hasMany, belongsTo or hasOne relationships are recognized by default as the (singular) name of the related model followed by _id. So if a baker hasMany cakes, the cakes table will refer to the baker in the bakers table via a baker_id foreign key.

Join tables, used in hasAndBelongsToMany (HABTM) relationships between models should be named after the model tables they will join in alphabetical order (apples_zebras rather than zebras_apples).

All tables CakePHP models interact with (with the exception of join tables), require a singular primary key to uniquely identify each row. If you wish to model a table which does not have a single-field primary key, such as the rows of your posts_tags join table, CakePHP's convention is that a single-field primary key is added to the table.

CakePHP does not support composite primary keys. In the event that you want to directly manipulate your join table data, this means that you need to either use direct query calls, or add a primary key field to be able to act on it as a normal model. E.g.:

CREATE TABLE posts_tags (
id INT(10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
post_id INT(10) NOT NULL,
tag_id INT(10) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY(id));