variable column table

Got a question about taking a logical db design into a physical Oracle one.

Name-Value pairs for an entity (can be anything - pretend you are storing a bunch of INI or conf files in Oracle for some obscure reason).

You do your normal relational design and you wind up with a table for name-value pairs, containing the PK for an entity (or INI/conf filename).

However, to extract all the values for a PK require multiple reads.. as oppose to have a fixed table where the names are columns and the values are column values.

In the table case however, you have to define a fixed set of columns. Adding a new column for every new name.. how desirable is that? Especially if this needs to be done from a client front-end.

In essense, such a db design calls for table with variable columns.. (for a lack of a better description)

Any comments, ideas or suggestions on how to tackle this in Oracle?

--
Billy