OpenCart Transactional (aka InnoDB support)

rph wrote:

evimail wrote:In OpenCart you have customer name and contact data in two tables: Customer and Order. What happens if you need to change the e-mail - have to change it in at in two places making at least two update queries.

Orders don't get dynamically updated nor would you want them to. They're historical information. What a customer changes their address to today has no bearing on the address you shipped their order to six months ago. This is the way all modern ecommerce platforms operate.

Normally you use intermediate tables for solving this kind of needs. The main idea of relational databases is "no duplicated data" :-)
I doubt that ALL modern e-commerce platforms use OpenCart approach :-P

evimail wrote:Normally you use intermediate tables for solving this kind of needs. The main idea of relational databases is "no duplicated data" :-)

There is no duplicated data. You're confusing historical order information with current information on file.

I doubt that ALL modern e-commerce platforms use OpenCart approach :-P

If you took a couple minutes to look you'd see they do.

Normalization should be applied within systems, not across them. Nor is normalization an excuse for neglecting system redundancy where it is appropriate. Historical data is certainly such a case.

Every Open Source cart I've seen follows the practice of making the order table system a historical system. None of them specifically label it as such, though it would certainly be easier to conduct discussions if they did.

I don't see that cascades are a panacea for data integrity. They are potentially helpful if well implemented. If not, could be a quick path to trouble.

If you haven't seen data corruption in Open Cart yet you probably don't have sufficient experience with the cart. Nothing against the cart here, its just that one dropped TCP/IP connection at the right time WILL mung the dataset no matter how good the application is....

David

I've been working with OpenCart since the 0.x days with stores small and large. I've also been on this forum for years (plus the one that preceded it) and reports of corrupted databases are very rare.