Home Forums Database Design Design Ideas and Questions EAV's and NVP's are bad. So... What do YOU use as an alternative? RE: EAV's and NVP's are bad. So... What do YOU use as an alternative?

  • May 7, 2011 at 12:12 pm

    #1321406

    SQLRNNR (5/3/2011)

    Until recently I was biased against them having had extremely bad experiences with them. I have seen an implementation where it seems to work rather well. Thus, I would say it really depends on implementation and knowledge level of people implementing it.

    Exactly. "It Depends". I am curious though... what were the "extremely bad experiences" you had with them?

    The bad experiences that I had with them was someone decided that every table in our system (for a previous company) need to have an NVP table as an audit table. Although it made the data collection and audit triggers stupid-simple to write, they were a nightmare when it came to determining what a row looked like at a given point in time. It wasn't such a bad idea for very wide tables because it did save on storage, but those saving were pretty much negated by the extra storage required for the narrower tables which made up most of the system.

    If ever you are curious, I have it on good account that match.com uses an EAV.

    Ok, now you DID get my curiosity up. What are they using it for? Their main "people" table or ????

    --Jeff Moden

    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)