Question

I am developing an application that is required to store previous versions of database table rows to maintain a history of changes. I am recording the history in the same table but need the most current data to be accessible by a unique identifier that doesn’t change with new versions. I have a few ideas on how this could be done and was just looking for some ideas on the best way of doing this or whether there is any reason not to use one of my ideas:

1. Create a new row for each row version, with a field to indicate which row was the current row. The drawback of this is that the new version has a different primary key and any references to the old version will not return the current version.

2. When data is updated, the old row version is duplicated to a new row, and the new version replaces the old row. The current row can be accessed by the same primary key.

3. Add a second table with only a primary key, add a column to the other table which is foreign key to new table’s primary key. Use same method as described in option 1 for storing multiple versions and create a view which finds the current version by using the new table’s primary key.

Answer 1

#3 is probably best, but if you wanted to keep the data in one table, I suppose you could add a datetime column that has a now() value populated for each new row and then you could at least sort by date desc limit 1.

Overall though – multiple versions needs more info on what you want to do effectively as much as programatically…ie need more info on what you want to do.

R