Doctrine 2 is currently using "id" as the default name for identifier columns, and "_id" as suffix for corresponding foreign key columns. I think this is quite reasonable in most cases.

Now, assuming that for any reason I wanted to change this to something else for all relationships, currently there does not seem to be any easy way to do it.
You will have to give a complete JoinColumn definition on every single relationship declaration, like (assuming that I want the new ID name to be "dbID"):

/**

• @ManyToOne(targetEntity="persistentData\model\import\Whatever", inversedBy="someReferenceThatPointsHere")
• @JoinColumn(name="whatever_dbid", referencedColumnName="dbId")
  */

The reason why I am doing this is that I am doing a 1:1 data import based on a data model that is already defined, and it just happens to contain properties named "id",
which unfortunately even have a problem-domain meaning. So instead of mapping those problem-domain properties to something else (breaking my 1:1 convention), or
using something that does have a problem-domain-meaning as a primary key (which I consider bad practice), I thought I might just use purely technical ids and instruct
doctrine to choose a different name for those. This is, fortunately, possible. But unless I am missing something here, it needs to be specified on every single relationship.

It would be great to have a less redundant way of configuring Doctrine to use a different name/suffix generally, e.g. by calling a setter method on the configuration object, like
$configuration->setDefaultIdColumnName().