I mean this: if the program and the reports all need to know the property name, it's the same thing as knowing the column name of the table. So I prefer the traditional design.

Besides that, adding a column isn't something difficult, so we should not be lazy about that.

Besides that, you can use foreign keys when a column valus needs options (example: single, married, divorced, etc.). You can't do that with property-values pairs.

Besides that, you can be sure that a requiered value is present using a "not null" column. That's dificult to achieve with a property-value design.

Regards, Marcos.