One thing to strongly consider for future releases is to record a COMPLETE snapshot of the order when recording an order. Right now, OrderDetails stores ProductID, UnitCost for a given product. Other order systems I have worked on have captured all product details for each order. I realize product information _shouldn't_ change but it often does. As the unit cost of the product is being stored, pricing changes won't affect the snapshot of the order, but I just feel like each order should be stored in it's denormalized entirety instead of relationally whereby product information may change.

-Kenneth S Courtney
http://host.aciasoftware.com

Kenneth and Dave,

Archiving the database on a periodic basis might be an answer. We are keeping a backup per week for 3 monthes and a backup for every last 12 monthes so we keep track of the full website content.

Not sure that changing a product description without changing its ref number is a good practice.

All this is probably a performance vs safety optimization and there is probably not a general solution.  We'll consider these suggestions anyway.