Re: Ideas for World Hierarchy Example

From: Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca>
Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2007 20:08:38 GMT
Message-ID: <a5wqh.912$1x.13550@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca>

Marshall wrote:

> 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.

What do you consider the potential for using the EAV approach as a physical storage medium from which to deliver relational results at the logical level? Received on Sun Jan 14 2007 - 14:08:38 CST