I built my inventory system like this, I have a products table that contains all the information specific to each part, less the quantity, i.e. Part Number, Description, Vendor, Color, Weight, SKU number, etc... Then I have another table that is my Inventory Tranactions Log that is just the following Date, ProductID, Qty, TypeOfTranacstion, Comment The inventory for each part may adjust daily or not. When parts are removed/sold the transaction log gets a record for that product and the number of parts that were sold and the type of transaction that occurred. When parts are received another transaction is entered for that part with the quantity received and the type of transaction that occurred. When we close the store and want to take a full inventory we first run a report that get the sums of all the transactions for each product and that tells us what should be on the shelf according to the database. Then we verify or adjust the qty for each product on the shelf by adding a record to the transaction log indicating the quantity and the type of transaction that occurred. When we want to see the values in the inventory its a very simple report to get the sums for each product. - Hope that helps.
>>> Ian Klassen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 1/18/06 10:09:55 AM >>> Hi all, I'm trying to figure out a solution to the following problem. Let's say I have a store with various products. I take inventory of these products on different days. At any given time I want to view what the inventory is for the entire store. I also want to know whether the inventory in the result was taken on that day or was carried forward from a previous date. I may also have to make changes to the inventories previously recorded. I have a few solutions, none of which I'm really happy with. The first is to create rows that contain the inventory for each product on a given day. If no inventory was taken for a given product then leave the column null. date_of_inventory| product a| product b| product c 2006-01-02| 100| 50| 25 2006-01-03| NULL| 45| NULL 2006-01-05| 78| NULL| 22 To obtain the inventory on any given day I would have to query each product and find the most recent time that it was updated. With this solution there is a lot of wasted space caused by the NULL's. Another solution would be to have a start and end date for when the inventory is valid such as: start_date| end_date| product a| pa_up| product b| pb_up| product c | pc_up 2006-01-02| 2006-01-03| 100| TRUE| 50| TRUE| 25 | TRUE 2006-01-03| 2006-01-05| 100| FALSE| 45| TRUE| 25| FALSE 2006-01-05| 2006-01-05| 78| TRUE| 45| FALSE| 22| TRUE With this solution I can quickly retrieve the inventory on any given day and see what inventory was taken on that day (which product update columns are set to TRUE). However, I see the update side of this as a nightmare (especially considering I'm duplicating data). A third solution could be breaking each product into its own table. This would eliminate the issues with the first two solutions but I would end up with hundreds of tables which I would like to avoid. Any help on the direction that I should go would be greatly appreciated. Ian -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
