Re: Custom Fields Database Architecture

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 12:50:28PM +0100, Greg Stark wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Gnanam<gnanam(at)zoniac(dot)com> wrote:
> >
> > I also read some article which talks about the type of patterns:
> > 1. Meta-database
> > 2. Mutating
> > 3. Fixed
> > 4. LOB
> >
> > My question here is, what is the best approach to define the
> > architecture for custom fields. Performance should not be
> > compromised.
>
> The reason there are multiple patterns are because the best approach
> depends very much on the specifics of your needs.
>
> For all David's dogma there are use cases where EAV is the best fit.

Sure there are, just not until every other option has been exhausted.

The amount of maintenance needed for EAV always increases, usually
with quite nasty complexity terms, which means you need to budget
resources for that maintenance if it turns out you can't do it any
other way.

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

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