I have a situation where I need to store a general piece of data (could be an int, float, or string) in my database, but I don't know ahead of time which it will be. I need a table (or less preferably tables) to store this unknown typed data.
What I think I am going to do is have a column for each data type, only use one for each record and leave the others NULL
. This requires some logic above the database, but this is not too much of a problem because I will be representing these records in models anyway.
Basically, is there a best practice way to do something like this? I have not come up with anything that is less of a hack than this, but it seems like this is a somewhat common problem. Thanks in advanced.
EDIT: Also, is this considered 3NF?