database performance questions

Hi everone,

    I'm currently planning a database architecture , that administrates documents . The structure ( properties ) of such documents may vary, so I decided to build an architecture that makes it possible for the user to add or change properties.
The properties may be numeric, strings or date-time values, so I currently decided to build several tables: one for holding base information about the document ( author, createtime , ...) , one table for numeric fields, another for their contents, one for string-content and so on. This ends up in loads of related tables and I' worried about performance problems running queries on this structure. ( concerning an amount of estimated 100000 up to 200000 documents. )

So my question(s) is/are :
(1) Is their a more simple or efficient way to implement such datastructures
on a relational database ?
(2) Or should I implement a database system on my own ? :-((
(3) Concerning relational databases : Would Oracle 8 be the best decision to
avoid such performance problems ?

Any help appreciated,
thx
Charly Received on Fri Feb 04 2000 - 00:00:00 CET