Re: 2 Questions.

At 5:38 PM -0500 9/13/08, Tom Shaw wrote:

Can anybody give me any good reasons not to use a time stamp as an order number in my shopping cart. It seems to me that the number is guaranteed to be random and it saves having to make an extra time column to keep track of the order. The only small concern I have is the chance that somebody orders at the exact same time as somebody else but the chance of that has got to be incredibly small but possible.

<opinion based upon experience> While time stamp is usually unique, it isn't always -- don't assume it will be unique. An order number should be a unique auto increment id (i.e., sequential) in your table. It should be representative of the customer's order -- it should contain the customer id; shipping/billing address; what the customer ordered (all items ordered); the time-date of the transaction; authorization code provided by the clearing house; and payment amount -- and basically nothing else (i.e., No credit card information). While you might think an order number should be something else, keep in mind that an order is simply an order. It is a point in time where a customer has agreed to purchase something and you have accepted and have cleared that purchase for that payment through some sort of purchasing scheme. It makes no difference if your dB is normalized, or relational, or some stock-boy working in a warehouse, or a phone order operator pressing an "Done" button. It is simply an order number. While you might think a microtime stamp would work, a unique auto increment id will work better. </opinion based upon experience>

My second question is I've designed a very simple Postgres database wrapper. The methods are exactly what you would assume to see in any db wrapper a pg_query, pg_fetch_array. My question is in the db wrapper, is there an easy way to always include the table name as an index in all my pg_fetch_array returned results? The reason I ask is when designing my tables I'm delegated to prefixing my column names i.e. users_name instead of just name or forum_posts instead of just posts to make sure there's no collision.

I'm not sure if I understand your question, but I'll try to answer what I think you are asking. Regardless of the dB, I find it best to have a configuration file that contains and defines all the variables re the dB (i.e., db_name, db_user, db_password, db_table<whatever>, and so on). That way, all you have to do is to include that file in your scripts. If you want to change something, you can change it in just one file. Cheers, tedd -- ------- http://sperling.com http://ancientstones.com http://earthstones.com