History within your applications

Here’s a question to all you hardcore developer people. How important is history in your design of an application.

Lets say for instance, you have a client who has a car and a household on your system. Would it be important to you to be able to see the history of the client at any moment? For me this is a must, but due to an executive decision this will probably never get implemented. We are redesigning the system here so its the perfect time to implement something like this. The only reason I’ve received for not being allowed to implement it, is that the powers that be do not want redundant info in the database.

Its easy to implement though and I feel it is a very important part of any financial system. What are your thoughts?

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Posted under Development by StevenMcD on Wednesday 25 July 2007 at 9:00 am

2 Comments »

  1. Comment by Francois — July 27, 2007 @ 7:38 am

    From a BI Perspective, History is a must. Keeping history in a database with a Effective Date column added is no issue at all… And changing a select statement to include a subquery with a MAX(Effective_Date) would hardly add any overhead. If the application then includes a selectable for history, then how bad would a Between Filter be on the query…

    But if it isn’t a must and the powers that be wouldn’t really appreciate the effort and resources… Questionable…

  2. Comment by StevenMcD — July 27, 2007 @ 12:11 pm

    Especially since we deal with financial matters. But if/when things backfire we can deal with it then.

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