Basically, my question is this - I have a list of prices, some of which are historical (i.e. I want to be able to search that product X was $0.99 on March 11, $1.99 on April 1, etc...). What is the best way to store this information?
I assumed I would probably have a Product table that has a foreign key to a price table. I initially thought that storing the current price would probably be the best bet, but I think I want to be able to store historical price data, so would the better route to go be to store a table like the following for the price list:
CREATE TABLE prices (
id BIGINT auto_increment not null,
primary key (id),
price DECIMAL(4,2) not null,
effectiveStartDate DATETIME NOT NULL,
effectiveEndDate DATETIME
);
I'm at a bit of a loss here. I'd like to be able to search products efficiently and see how the price of that product changed over time. How can I efficiently associate a set of these prices with a product? I guess what I am asking is, 'What would be the best way to index this in order to be able to provide an efficient search for queries that span a specific set of dates?'