Re: variable column table

Paul Brewer wrote:

> No magic really, I'm afraid. Sad to report that in my (admittedly limited)
> experience, one of three things always happens in the end:
>
> a) Queries end up with hard coded values - which defeats the object.
> b) It's all run procedurally - and performance suffers accordingly.
> c) We have technically correct SQL, but it never finishes.

Thanks Paul. But I'm not that pessimistic. Yet. :-)

Will likely start working on the logical and physical db designs soon and will see what we can do to lick this problem.

The crux is - if the name-value pairs are hard coded as table columns, this will have a big impact on the planning tools envisaged. It is much easier for a planning tool to do its thing on table containing (entity_id,name,value) than to go and select on user_tables to see what tables there are and then figure out how to deal with the columns that differ between tables entitity_1 and entity_2...

--
Billy