On 14 May 2007 02:16:31 -0700, strawberry <zac.carey@gmail.com> wrote:

>case 2 sounds like an EAV approach - and, although used successfully
>in some environments (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-...e-Value_model),
>it's usually frowned upon in this NG.

I had to use it for a part of a project, in the worst case : when the
attributes have almost all sorts of types (integer, floats, dates,
blobs, ...). For cases where you have only numerical attributes for
example, it can work smoothly. But as soon as you have to store
integers as strings, the operations and searches on the objects become
hell.