aaron.reese (10/3/2012)
out of interest then; if I was selling books (ISBN, Author, Pages), wine (bottle size, ABV,Vinyard,grape,acidity) and shirts (material,collar type, sleeve length), how would you recommend storing the attributes for those products so that they were both easy to insert and easy to extract.
If you're going to try to cram such disparate entities into a single table you need to have a very very good reason to do so. In your scenario I don't see any reason why you wouldn't have separate tables for the completely different items you're selling. You can still query in such a way as to combine different items from the different tables without sacrificing sensible design.