Hi, Can anyone put a name to the following type of design...
I need to be able to modify the amount/names of data "fields" stored for an entity so instead of representing the data stored for an entity in fields associated with that entity you would relate it to an another entity which would contain a datafield type field and its associated value, so different rows in the parent table could possibly have different datafields associated with it. E.g The parent table is "person" and it holds common data amongst all people - it has primary key of personID. There is another table assoicated with person called "personDetails". This would have fields "personID", "dataType" and "dataValue". It might have records like the following: personID, dataType, dataValue 1,phone,123456 1,email,[email protected] 1,state,NSW 2,phone,987456321 2,state,VIC 3,phone,789456123 Of course this is just an example - the parent entity could be anything. Hope someone can put a name to this sort of design. I want to research into this to see how people search effectively in this design and its performance compared to traditional methods etc etc. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks Adam. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
