Constants in Kotlin — what’s a recommended way to create them?

Avoid using companion objects. Behind the hood, getter and setter instance methods are created for the fields to be accessible. Calling instance methods is technically more expensive than calling static methods.

public class DbConstants {
    companion object {
        val TABLE_USER_ATTRIBUTE_EMPID = "_id"
        val TABLE_USER_ATTRIBUTE_DATA = "data"
    }

Instead define the constants in object.

Recommended practice :

object DbConstants {
        const val TABLE_USER_ATTRIBUTE_EMPID = "_id"
        const val TABLE_USER_ATTRIBUTE_DATA = "data"
}

and access them globally like this:
DbConstants.TABLE_USER_ATTRIBUTE_EMPID