I heartily agree with Jay. Use paper and pencil to decide what information you want to maintain about each of the "objects" (users, customers, administrators, credits, debits, products, catalogs, descriptions, carts, cart contents, etc.) in your system. When your paper model supports the business model you want to have, now you are in a position where you can BEGIN the process of database design.
In this case I would think that what you need to keep in your database will be heavily driven by the needs of the website, the billing department, the stock managers, and the sales managers. Basically, you need to make sure that all of the other business processes involved with this site have identified every piece of information they will need from you in order to do their jobs properly. Until they have, you will be working in the dark. Make sure your data consumers (all of those other people) "sign off" on what they give you as being complete (I practically guarantee that it won't be the first time around. But it's a start!). That way you can keep your project creep to a minimum and you will most likely avoid a major eleventh-hour rewrite because some other manager comes up to you and says, "oh, by the way, where's the XXX data for this purchase?" and you didn't have it in your model. Pencil and paper are your best friends. Shawn Green Database Administrator Unimin Corporation - Spruce Pine "Jay Blanchard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 10/21/2004 01:50:18 PM: > [snip] > I am writing an online store for my company using MySQL, and PHP. I was > wondering if anyone could suggest the table structure to include. > [/snip] > > This is way too open ended for a sane answer. There are database > structures for as many folks as have designed online stores. Have you > done a flowchart, UML, or any other plan? This is the first place you > start looking when trying to decide these things. If you haven't, stop > now...get out a pencil and paper, and draw it up. > > -- > MySQL General Mailing List > For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql > To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] >
