Re: Modeling a table with arbitrary columns

2009/10/29 Andreas Hartmann <andreas(at)apache(dot)org>

> Hi everyone,
>
> I want to model the following scenario for an online marketing application:
>
> Users can create mailings. The list of recipients can be uploaded as
> spreadsheets with arbitrary columns (each row is a recipient). I expect the
> following maximum quantities the DB will contain:
>
> I see basically two approaches to store the recipients:
>
> A) A single table with a fixed number of generic columns. If the
> spreadsheet has less columns than the table, the values will be null.
>
> B) Two tables, one for the recipients and one for the values:
>

One more option is to use arrays (and single table).