Question about best practice on overwriting records vs deleting records

[Isaac]

I can't make any of these decisions for you. I've given you my opinion. If there is a paper trail (or email or whatever), I would not delete or overwrite the data. I would always want an audit trail. Here's a simple real world example. You have an order entry system. A customer adds 3 items to his order. He then deletes item 2 before going to checkout. Should I archive item 2 or just delete it since it never really happened. Likely as not, I would allow a delete in this case but once the order had proceeded to checkout, now the customer has seen the completed order and whether he printed it out or not, he might have so if at this point he goes back to his order entry and asks to delete item 2, I would now choose to archive it rather than delete it because there could be a reference to the item in the real world and I would need to be able to answer the question of what happened to item 2 should the customer call and say why did my order contain only two items when I ordered three.

and there is SO much analysis that may help your marketing decisions from saving ....hmm...what is that terms i'm looking for, not market basket analysis, but the analysis of what pages a customer went to and at what point they specifically changed their mind about a product - point in time analysis or something.

it might be very valuable to know that a lot of customers were adding, for example, "you also need to buy" items to their cart but eventually removing them