Simple ? Customer Order DB

[paul_y3k]

I'm looking to build a very simple db which I'll then build up into something more complex. After sitting down with some pen and paper, I've established that the key part of the DB will be my customers and their order. Due to the nature of the business, its unlikely the customer will make more than one order. However each order will always be for 12 products from a list of 180 or so.

With that in mind I am going to create a customer table, to store all the customer details and create a Product table to store the 180 products. My question is, how should I record the order ? I have in mind creating an order table but I'm not sure whether to create a single record per order, with 12 fields for each product choice ... or to create multiple records with a unique id per row, and the order number and order choice recorded per row.

I think using a single row per order, with the 12 fields populated from the products table makes more sense ?

[pbaldy]

I would stay with the normalized structure. If I ask you how much of product A you've sold, do you want to have to search 12 fields or 1?

[orange]

There are free data models available that may help you with soome concepts and relationships.
see
http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_...ucts/index.htm
http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_...ders/index.htm

Good luck with your project.