How do you store sales?

How would you store sales ?

I though ab开发者_运维技巧out storing a serialized array which contains the products ordered vs a sale_product table with a foreign key referencing products ordered.

What are you thoughts about this ? Any experience with one of these ?

Ty

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It depends on what you are trying to optimize. A sale_product table is a much better way to go if you want flexibility and ability to do complex queries. The other way could be suitable for a few scenarios where performance of one type of query is really important.

If you are just starting, I would consider a normalized design first, because I would consider the other design premature optimization. When designing a database model, I like to think of what kind of operations the database will need to support (both frontend and reporting), and then design the model.

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Sales are not necessarily identical to Orders. An order may not result in a sale if the product can unexpectedly not be delivered, if payment bounces, etc.