Data model design problem

Hi:

Am designing a data model for an application that needs to track info on customers. However, the nature of information that needs to be tracked keeps on changing with time. For instance, today we don't need to find what cars people drive but this may become important tomorrow. All the information that would be collected can be classified into some categories such as demographic info, professional info, etc. However the specific fields within these categories can change. These changes will be done through the front-end or scripts.

The primary use of this database is to query for customers with specific attributes, say, 30-50 year olds who work as designers, for instance. Typical queries are much more complex and performance is a significant factor in the design.

One solution is to have a meta-data for the info fields and keep the customer data with foreign keys into the meta-data tables. However, this would impact performance.

Is there a better solution ?

tia,
skrishnan Received on Sun Jul 22 2001 - 01:29:59 CEST