Custom Product Attribute in Order Info

I've got a custom product attribute (style_number) I'd like to be part of Order History, customer-facing emails, etc.

I have included this as part of my quote (by adding it into in the XML), but what is the best way to get this into the order data as well? I cannot pick and choose attributes in this same way, from what I can tell.

I see two appraoches:

1. Mage::getModel('sales/order').... which has obvious performance implications.

2. Edit the sa开发者_JS百科les order table to include this new column and, when converting a quote to an order, add in this data.

2 has been recommended to me but editing the table still sounds risky. Should I proceed with #2, or are there better alternatives?

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add those to sales_flat_order and sales_flat_quote table as columns, you can do that via setup scripts