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?