Re: Custom Fields Database Architecture

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 10:37:04PM +0200, Stefan Keller wrote:
> @David: You wrote in the links cited "The "flexibility" stems from
> fear of making a design decision.".  That's an important note.
> Nevertheless, there are use cases where you *can not* know in
> advance what the name is of the attribute!

Those cases are extremely rare, and they don't fit with an RDBMS.

> To me that's not fear but adaptiveness, modesty and knowing when to
> break the rules!  An apparent successful example of this EAV design
> is OpenStreetMap
> (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Database_schema).

Funny you should mention that.  The OpenStreetMap people are hitting
exactly the issues I named, and they're ruing the day they decided on
that "schema."  I don't recommend that anybody re-make their mistake.

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david@fetter.org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778  AIM: dfetter666  Yahoo!: dfetter
Skype: davidfetter      XMPP: david.fetter@gmail.com

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