Data is the heart of any application that needs to retain or manipulate information in any way. How to go about storing information in a database is generally a cause of consternation for developers building applications from scratch. The problem, you see, is that unlike any other part of a program, which can generally be used with little to no modification for other applications, databases must be tailored precisely to their specific application in order to be effective. You don’t need to worry about this though; it’s all taken care of already.
As you know, osCommerce sites use the MySQL Relational Database Management System to store information about products, customers, sessions, languages, configuration, orders, reviews, specials, and a bunch of other things. The structure of the database is created and built during the installation process and is ready to work whenever you decide to make changes. In fact, we have already been working with data because the...