On 9/16/11, Always Learning <cen...@u61.u22.net> wrote: > C1 > > c1ref > c1customer (code) > c1quantity (integers only) > c1price (in cents) > c1discount (2 decimal places held as integers) > c1catalogue (code) > c1date (yymmdd) > c1order (number) > c1comments (text) > > then do a query: > > select c1quantity, c1price, c1discount from c1 where c1customer = > 'joebloggs' and c1date like '10%'
Isn't it bad practise to store customer reference by name? What happens if we want to look up a customer called John Smith and there are say a dozen of them? I would at the very least have a separate table holding core customer information with an auto-incremented ID so that customers with the same name won't cause a problem. Of course, that would mean requiring a join on the query, or at the very least two queries with one pulling the customer ID first. Although since the base customer ID table is usually a frequently accessed but not changed table, it's likely to be in memory and therefore faster to issue a join, which the dbms should handle smartly enough than to separate queries. _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
