Your opinion about storing invoice line items as a list rather than records

[Jean Marc Azerad]

Hi Das,

I fully agree with Mike and add a simple comment:
In an invoice, you bill services or products. 
It means that you may need to deal with statistics like “How may of this product have I sold this year?”
Easy when each line stored in an individual record in a table.
Almost impossible  if you store in a list inside the Invoice table

Just my 2cents

JM



> Le 20 janv. 2018 à 08:22, Mike Matthews <omnis at lineal.co.uk> a écrit :
> 
> Hello Das
> 
> Always store each line as separate records in a table.  Not as a List as you suggest.  When you get corruption, you cannot rebuild, and at some time, you will get damage.  The data will be slow to search as well, as no index will exist for any of the data.  If you start to build an index record of the lines, you might as well just make the whole line.
> 
> This is good advice, even if you were not using SQLand still using the Omnis datafile.
> 
> Mike
> 
> 
> Mike Matthews, Managing Director, Lineal Software Solutions Ltd
> 
> Apple Reseller, Microsoft Partner, SQLWorks Business Partner
> phone: 01271 375999 | web: lineal.co.uk | email: mike.matthews at lineal.co.uk
> 
>> On 20 Jan 2018, at 00:58, Das Goravani <das at goravani.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> What’s your opinion about
>> 
>> Line items of an invoice
>> 
>> store them as a complete list in the invoice header, store a list with each invoice
>> 
>> or store them as small records, each line item is a record
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> only advantage I can see for line item records is that you can search up what invoices a certain product appeared on real fast, but that’s not that common of a search request
>> 
>> 
>> seems to me you can safely store the invoice line items in one list in the invoice header
>> 
>> 
>> das goravani
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