newbie: using id's or total desciption

(english is not my mother tongue)

I'm planing a database for sales managment in a little shop. I have a table for all articles and one for all customers. Than one for all invoices and one for all sold articles.

The one with the invoices hold every data of a invoice without the artciles of the invoice. These articles are saved in the table sold_articles with the invoice id.

My question is:

If i save an invoice, should i save only the id of the customer the invoice goes to or should i save the customers name and address instead of the id?
My thought is that anyone could change the customers data completly and if one looks at the invoices later it points to the customer but the data is totally different. But if i save the customers address and name, you can the for whom the invoice was really.

I have the same problem with the sold_articles. Should i just save the articles id or all the data like article number, description, supplier etc. in the sold_artciles table.

Same tought as above. If anyone changes all the articles data, then the bill is not coorect anymore.

thanx for tips.

Mirko Koenig Received on Thu Apr 24 2003 - 18:10:01 CEST