Re: Modelling objects with variable number of properties in an RDBMS
From: vc <boston103_at_hotmail.com>
Date: 31 Oct 2005 05:36:40 -0800
Message-ID: <1130765800.098046.93870_at_f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>
Date: 31 Oct 2005 05:36:40 -0800
Message-ID: <1130765800.098046.93870_at_f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>
Roy Hann wrote:
....
> Actually no, let's not. What you have re-invented here is the tired old
> entity-attribute-value (EAV) design (much beloved of medical research wonks
> for some reason).
Often they do that (EAV) not because they do not know any better but in order to overcome a specific database physical limitations. Their entities very often contain thousands of attributes (molecular biology/pharmaceutical research/drug discovery), and for example Oracle supports maximum 1000 columns.
I believe that only Oracle and DB2 have support for user defined types which would allow to solve the multi-thousand attribute problem differently. Received on Mon Oct 31 2005 - 14:36:40 CET