[ic] Normalized database for the Foundation demo.

[Jonathan Clark]

> I've been testing/evaluating IC the entire week-end for a
> personal project.
>
> I'm pretty new to IC and love the product but there is a slight problem.
>
> This is what I did: I ran a ‘makecat mystore’ and used MySQL as RDBMS.
> I than went on to test a few things. Filled in my cart, checked
> out, created
> a user (with the wrong country information – not on purpose), placed the
> order, went to the admin section to see the order, edited the
> user (with the
> right country information), and then went on to check if the order was
> updated accordingly… and it wasn’t.
> (That’s what led me to think that the DB was NOT normalized).
>
> My point is :
> Since (I think that) the Foundation Demo is the base for most production
> applications How difficult would it be to normalize (to the 3rd form) its
> database and which part of the app and the admin area would be affected.
>

Its my experience that you would not normalise the customer information out
of an order header anyway. If you were to do this, you would effectively be
able to rewrite order history - which I would consider undesirable.

Interchange was designed to be largely database independent - able for
function with RDBMS down to even to flat files. Normalising the the nth
degree would likely force another level of complexity for many people.

Additionally, foundation does not have a particularly complex or bloaty data
structure. Unless you are talking about tables with hundreds of thousands of
records, would you see a gain in normalising?

Jonathan
Webmaint.