Say I have a simple helpdesk application which logs calls made by users.

I would typically have such fields in a table relating to the call e.g. CallID, Description, CustomerID etc.

I Would also have a table of customers including CustomerID, Username, Password, FullName etc.

Now when a user is deleted from the customers table then the inner join between the calls table and the users table to find out historically which user logged a call would produce no results.

How do people usually deal with this?

• Have seperate customer and useraccount tables
• Just disable the accounts so the data is still available
• Record the customers name in the calls table as a seperate field.

or any other methods / suggestions?