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. 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. -- --Josh Josh Berkus PostgreSQL @ Sun San Francisco ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: You can help support the PostgreSQL project by donating at http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate