• dglane (9/18/2012)


    What a coincidence. In a thread below that I read, I learned that this may be the EAV model.

    It does indeed look like a variant of EAV - a variant which uses individual attribute tables, instead of either one atribute table per attribute type or the most common variant which achieves a single attribute table by encoding all attributes as text strings (so all have varchar type - or maybe all have nvarchar type).

    There are some systems for which an EAV model is a sensible design, but extremely few; but hype of EAV leads it to its being used where totally inappropriate, usually with appalling results. My advice is to avoid any such model unless you have checked very carefully indeed that it is appropriate for your applications and all likely future enhancements.

    You might find this conversation or this one or even this topic useful if you are thinking of doing something with a model like this.

    edit: fix URL tags

    Tom