On Wed, 2005-07-20 at 16:27 +0000, women_lover_best wrote:

> thks for such a detailed reply..is there a case study of walmart
> which I can go through?

Not that I am aware of ... I just have the good (bad) fortune to live
too close to Walmart corporate headquarters.

> Also,our requirements is to have monthly
> reports..so thinking of having a report table where aggregates will
> be maintained for each month..any other suggestions?

Aggregate your monthly reports as ... reports (revolutionary idea).
Save them as PDF, HTML, or Text files. In a POS environment, these
reports should not change once they are generated.

Run you quarterly and annual reports against the warehouse tables, which
are separate under this model from your active week's business tables.

If your reports are too time consuming to produce, move the warehouse
tables to a separate server. Large scale installations annual reports
may take several days to run on (very) high end hardware.

Alternatively, look into data warehousing and mining tools.

> Pay attention to
> Sarbanes-Oxley requirements for your transaction
> boundaries..what is sarbanes-Oxley?

Sarbanes-Oxley is the set of laws passed in the wake of the Enron
collapse to ensure transparency of financial operations. What they
amount to is making sure that every dollar is accounted for, and audit
trails are (A) unbroken and (b) are obvious when they get broken.

CEO's and CIO's go to jail if the company's records are not up to
standard.

>
> Also, I have a reqquirement to record time of each transaction..ie
> when actually it happened...should i use server time or sth better is
> available?
>

Use server time, synchronized to a public time service such as the
Denver Observatory Atomic Clock. If you must (or might in the future)
operate across time zone boundaries, keep all times internally as UTC
(or GMT, or whatever it is called this week), and convert to local time
for display/print out only.