Karen Sundquist (karensundq@yahoo.com) writes:
> One alternative is to create a table containing field-name/value
> pairs. This is ugly and breaks the ER modelling rules that tell me yo
> put attributes of an item into the same row. All the same, I would
> prefer this method to the first approach.

This would be my preference too.

Of course, neither this is going to be fun if you want reports with
these attributes as columns. You could define views that twisted
the rows as columns, but with over 100 columns that will be a horrible
self-join if all attributes are to be included.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinf...2000/books.asp