Hello. In my site, I'll be inviting people to contribute variety of content, like pictures, video, and things alike. Besides the core content, I'll be capturing meta data. Some meta data will be common across content types and some will be specific.
I am planning to have 1 table that accommodates universe of meta data with that many columns (encompassing all content types). One of the columns will have URI to the actual content. For each content type, I shall create a database view. How good is this design (I guess performance will be impacted)?.
Further, the above is inspired from how SharePoint handles variety of document types (without having to define as many document libraries) and also Amazon's SimpleDB that sweetly grows (column wise) on need basis. The problem with latter is that I cannot define views and relations. I'd like to know whether Amazon's SimpleDB should be used for this purpose or I am better off with an RDBMS?