Josh Berkus wrote:
> Amdrew,
>
>> I have yet to encounter one, but
>> Josh has more experience, and more varied experience than I do. To me,
>> EAV is a perfect example of ignoring the YAGNI principal.
>
> I've done plenty of applications where part of the specification for the
> application was "User Defined Fields" allowing the users to customize the
> data structure at runtime. This is a very, very common thing; of the 15
> or so commercial applications I implemented from scratch as a consultant
> probably 10 of them had it.
Just to add a note from YAJ, custom fields are unfortunately a
requirement in most apps I have seen, from a CMS to Quickbooks. The
reality is, you don't know everything the person wants to know about a
particular set of data.
Joshua D. Drake
>
> I really don't see any way you could implement UDFs other than EAV that
> wouldn't be immensely awkward, or result in executing DDL at runtime.
>
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