Hmm... i've been looking for monitors at www.dell.com (the accessories section) and i noticed in the shopping cart area, they have a feature called save. What i think this does is that it adds something to their database (probably MS SQL Server). My question is, would each new account need a table for itself?

I was thinking of how they did this save feature (adds info to database), and am curious as to what method they did this. Do you think they have a different table for each account? Or 1 big table for multiple accounts or what? What would be the best way to accomplish their save feature?

No no no! =) Having a table for each account would be like having a hard drive for each file on your computer. Very inefficient. Accounts, or information that's similar like it is stored in records - which is pretty much like a row in a table. So you can have a table called Customers, and in that table, you have a record for each customer.

Would that table have all the ordering history of the customer and their saved stuff? Or would one table be for the ordering history and another for their saved?

It all depends on the complexity of the application, and who organized it. The designer of the database can include all the information about the customer in one record if he/she wants. Whatever the situation may be, he has to worry about normalization (avoiding duplicate fields; making the database design efficient), etc. Thats why tables can relate, and it's why we have relational databases.

What would you do?

It would depend what data I had to store. In the applications that I've written myself, I've never used more than 8 tables. On forums, I usually use just 3 tables.

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