PHP Advanced for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickPro Guide

Creating the Database

The foundation for the store will be a database containing all the tables required for recording the customers, products, and transactions. Because databases are significantly more secure than flat files, you always want to use them for e-commerce applications so that the store and user information is safely kept away from curious eyes.

The first table you'll need—and the easiest to design—is for the customers (or users), detailed in Table 6.1.

Table 6.1. The users table keeps a list of every customer the site has. One update to the database would be to make the information in this table more international in scope by allowing for less Americentric addresses.

Table Users
Column	Data Type
user_id	number
username	text
password ...