It came up again today how to handle allowing users to add custom fields to the standard entity schemas delivered in your product's database. I favour actually providing a function that gives the user limited DDL functions, so they can actually add a new, custom field to a table. Another approach is to have a separate table for custom ...
The major shortcomings with Entity-Attribute-Value database designs in SQL all seem to be related to being able to query and report on the data efficiently and quickly. Most of the information I read on the subject warn against implementing EAV due to these problems and the commonality of querying/reporting for almost all applications. ...
I'm working with a database set up like this: entity field value 1 start_date June 1, 2010 1 end_date August 30, 2010 1 artist some name And I want to query all the entities with artist name "some name" that have started but not ended. I came up with something like this: SELECT start.entity F...