Re: Ideas for World Hierarchy Example

From: Marshall <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com>
Date: 14 Jan 2007 11:50:55 -0800
Message-ID: <1168804255.140817.178420@11g2000cwr.googlegroups.com>

On Jan 14, 10:22 am, Bernard Peek <b..._at_shrdlu.com> wrote:

> How about turning the collective brainpower of the group on a
> constructive task: design a workable computer-based EAV system. The
> librarians built theirs 200 years ago, and it has been largely unchanged
> since Mr Dewey used Mr Aristotle's classification methods to create it.
> Can we do better in the 21st century?

Been working on this for the last two years with a decent sized team. (I argued against this approach early on and lost.) The problems with EAV are fundamental, so I don't see any path to doing "better."

EAV is a cheapo way to capture some data when your requirements are fuzzy, or when you don't understand your domain well enough to model it. It lacks structure, so you necessarily do not get the benefits of structure, semantic or otherwise.

Sometime I mean to sit down and write up some queries in SQL against a fully modeled schema and against an EAV schema and compare.

Marshall Received on Sun Jan 14 2007 - 13:50:55 CST