Re: My honours project - databases using dynamically attached entity-properties

Amdrew,

> I have yet to encounter one, but
> Josh has more experience, and more varied experience than I do. To me,
> EAV is a perfect example of ignoring the YAGNI principal.

I've done plenty of applications where part of the specification for the 
application was "User Defined Fields" allowing the users to customize the 
data structure at runtime.  This is a very, very common thing; of the 15 
or so commercial applications I implemented from scratch as a consultant 
probably 10 of them had it.

I really don't see any way you could implement UDFs other than EAV that 
wouldn't be immensely awkward, or result in executing DDL at runtime.

-- 
--Josh

Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco