dell.com shopping cart save feature

[AlPhA]

Hmm... i've been looking for monitors at www.dell.com (the accessories section) and i noticed in the shopping cart area, they have a feature called save. What i think this does is that it adds something to their database (probably MS SQL Server). My question is, would each new account need a table for itself?

I was thinking of how they did this save feature (adds info to database), and am curious as to what method they did this. Do you think they have a different table for each account? Or 1 big table for multiple accounts or what? What would be the best way to accomplish their save feature?

[samaru]

No no no! =) Having a table for each account would be like having a hard drive for each file on your computer. Very inefficient. Accounts, or information that's similar like it is stored in records - which is pretty much like a row in a table. So you can have a table called Customers, and in that table, you have a record for each customer.

[AlPhA]

Would that table have all the ordering history of the customer and their saved stuff? Or would one table be for the ordering history and another for their saved?

[samaru]

It all depends on the complexity of the application, and who organized it. The designer of the database can include all the information about the customer in one record if he/she wants. Whatever the situation may be, he has to worry about normalization (avoiding duplicate fields; making the database design efficient), etc. Thats why tables can relate, and it's why we have relational databases.

[AlPhA]

What would you do?

[samaru]

It would depend what data I had to store. In the applications that I've written myself, I've never used more than 8 tables. On forums, I usually use just 3 tables.