Rob Marjot wrote:
> Thank you, Ben. Well, I'm afraid you got the basic idea... I intend to
> implement a hybrid between a fixed schema and an
> Entity-Attribute-Value scheme. The schema will be able to cover 90% of
> the data needs; in other cases (specific projects) additional fields
> (and/or tables/relations) will be needed; including their constraints...
If you absolutely must have a dynamic schema like this, and can't have a
DBA simply add tables as needed, then I think it would be less work,
overall, to create a schema that your application has DDL rights to, and
then let it create and modify normal tables with normal constraints there.
There certainly are some cases where an EAV solution is the proper one,
and yours may be one of them. But most aren't.