Database Design - storing purchases

[Talyesyn_Rama]

How are purchases usually stored in database?

When we are dealing with multiple goods, you don't know how many will need to go into the database at one time.

If just one product was being sold, you could have one table and each transaction would be one row, now, with multiple products do you add a row for each product? and have a Transaction ID next to each product?

How is this usually done?

Thanks.

Tal

[dhodge]

Is this what your looking for...

Table 'Order'

Order_ID PK
Etc....

Table 'Order_Detail'
Order_ID FK
Product_ID FK

So its a 1 to many relationship.

This is a normalized approach while there are ways to make it denormalized but at the expensse of database power.

Could just store the order_details (ie product ids and quantites) in a column in the order table. Like using the serialize() function.

Makes it easier to code but use lose some query power.