Re: What is this model technique called

> What the heck is a "spill-over attribute"? This sounds like you mean > "a bad design" and you ned to do some research. \

I am not advocating EAV as a first-design approach. I'll go further - I don't think the "E" part of EAV is a good idea either. But I will, and have used, the "attribute-value" [if there is such a concept?! :-))] generic model for those tables where attributes are virtually impossible to foresee at analysis/design time. So, in such cases, I would model the correct table and try my best to get a concrete set of attributes - but as a production-stopage risk mitigating design, I would hook off the "AV" (that's EAV - E) design for some "risky" tables.

Only as an exception. [Here we can accept poor performance because of the design, but in the mean time our production uptime is 100%.]

>>These are attributes, not wine.

LOL!
>>And columns are not fields.

why not? [I thought the industry uses these terms interchanageably?]

regards

Abdullah Received on Sun Jun 08 2003 - 04:20:36 CDT