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We frequently encounter the need to extend the database design and
applications to include so-called "user-defined data". Changes and improvements
to business processes depend on having some additional details that were not anticipated
in the original design. Sometimes entire new fact types must be added. Or sometimes truly
massive new extensions to the database must be allowed on an almost ad hoc basis.
In this paper I describe some of the details of these problems, and one frequently
proposed solution (the entity-attribute-value design, or EAV). I then describe a much
simpler, more flexible, and powerful solution the exploits the intrinsic capabilities of a
relational DBMS like Ingres.
The presentation is in the form of 27
Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 slides, zipped to 101kb and inflating to 212kb. |
