Database structure for storing historical data

Question

Preface: I was thinking the other day about a new database structure for a new application and realized that we needed a way to store historical data in an efficient way. I was wanting someone else to take a look and see if there are any problems with this structure. I realize that this method of storing data may very well have been invented before (I am almost certain it has) but I have no idea if it has a name and some google searches that I tried didn't yield anything.

Problem: Lets say you have a table for orders, and orders are related to a customer table for the customer that placed the order. In a normal database structure you might expect something like this:

orders
------
orderID
customerID


customers
---------
customerID
address
address2
city
state
zip

Pretty straightforward, orderID has a foreign key of customerID which is the primary key of the customer table. But if we were to go and run a report over the order table, we are going to join the customers table to the orders table, which will bring back the current record for that customer ID. What if when the order was placed, the customers address was different and it has been subsequently changed. Now our order no longer reflects the history of that customers address, at the time the order was placed. Basically, by changing the customer record, we just changed all history for that customer.

Now there are several ways around this, one of which would be to copy the record when an order was created. What I have come up with though is what I think would be an easier way to do this that is perhaps a little more elegant, and has the added bonus of logging anytime a change is made.

What if I did a structure like this instead:

orders
------
orderID
customerID
customerHistoryID


customers
---------
customerID
customerHistoryID


customerHistory
--------
customerHistoryID
customerID
address
address2
city
state
zip
updatedBy
updatedOn

please forgive the formatting, but I think you can see the idea. Basically, the idea is that anytime a customer is changed, insert or update, the customerHistoryID is incremented and the customers table is updated with the latest customerHistoryID. The order table now not only points to the customerID (which allows you to see all revisions of the customer record), but also to the customerHistoryID, which points to a specific revision of the record. Now the order reflects the state of data at the time the order was created.

By adding an updatedby and updatedon column to the customerHistory table, you can also see an "audit log" of the data, so you could see who made the changes and when.

One potential downside could be deletes, but I am not really worried about that for this need as nothing should ever be deleted. But even still, the same effect could be achieved by using an activeFlag or something like it depending on the domain of the data.

My thought is that all tables would use this structure. Anytime historical data is being retrieved, it would be joined against the history table using the customerHistoryID to show the state of data for that particular order.

Retrieving a list of customers is easy, it just takes a join to the customer table on the customerHistoryID.

Can anyone see any problems with this approach, either from a design standpoint, or performance reasons why this is bad. Remember, no matter what I do I need to make sure that the historical data is preserved so that subsequent updates to records do not change history. Is there a better way? Is this a known idea that has a name, or any documentation on it?

Thanks for any help.

Update: This is a very simple example of what I am really going to have. My real application will have "orders" with several foreign keys to other tables. Origin/destination location information, customer information, facility information, user information, etc. It has been suggested a couple of times that I could copy the information into the order record at that point, and I have seen it done this way many times, but this would result in a record with hundreds of columns, which really isn't feasible in this case.

Answer 1

When I've encountered such problems one alternative is to make the order the history table. Its functions the same but its a little easier to follow

orders
------
orderID
customerID
address
City
state
zip



customers
---------
customerID
address
City
state
zip

EDIT: if the number of columns gets to high for your liking you can separate it out however you like.

If you do go with the other option and using history tables you should consider using bitemporal data since you may have to deal with the possibility that historical data needs to be corrected. For example Customer Changed his current address From A to B but you also have to correct address on an existing order that is currently be fulfilled.

Also if you are using MS SQL Server you might want to consider using indexed views. That will allow you to trade a small incremental insert/update perf decrease for a large select perf increase. If you're not using MS SQL server you can replicate this using triggers and tables.