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Re: Dynamic structure of a table?!!

From: Andreas Sheriff <spamcontrol_at_iion.com>
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2005 08:08:57 -0800
Message-ID: <RdFjf.54782$qw.9505@fed1read07>


<sybrandb_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1133451374.804050.33040_at_g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> Ach C via DBMonster.com wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> I have an ER diagram which has an entity called "Form" .This is a
>> typical
>> electronic Form but number of its fields are not known and may vary at
>> future.
>>
>> What is the best logical design for this case? If I create a table for
>> this
>> Form I should add columns to it in the future.This does not seem
>> nice.Also I
>> do not want to use "Entity-Attribute-Value" method as described at:
>>
>>
>> http://tonyandrews.blogspot.com/2004/10/otlt-and-eav-two-big-design-mistakes.html
>>
>>
>> -Thanks
>>
>> --
>> Message posted via http://www.dbmonster.com
>
> Yet such a meta-approach is the only viable solution and often used by
> Telecom providers.
> If you don't want to use it, you are going to end up with adding
> columns.
>
> --
> Sybrand Bakker
> Senior Oracle DBA
>

Yeaaah ("Office Space"),

I started off as a programmer and had to use it as well.

I work in the Online Market Research field, and when we were developing our survey software, the most puzzling conundrum was, how to store the responses? The responses are variable and may need to be queried individually from time to time. My solution, to start with, was to use EAV and do massive joins, or filtering the data at the application end. Later, I discovered materialized views. If we had two RDBMS's running, I could have used one for OLTP and the other for OLAP and synchronize using replication, but being that we're trying to make money and not continually fund Oracle, we decided to create a hybrid database and created materialized views as necessary to do OLAP.

It works very well and fast. We can create surveys of any variable length and query the results through the materialized views using any statistical function.

-- 
Andreas
Oracle 9i Certified Professional
Oracle 10g Certified Professional
Oracle 9i Certified PL/SQL Developer


"If you don't eat your meat, you cannot have any pudding.
"How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?!?!"
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Received on Thu Dec 01 2005 - 10:08:57 CST

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