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POSingle table inheritance, EAV or NoSQL?
 

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    <p>I'm looking for a good sane approach for my application's data model. Most threads focus on e-commerce products and my scenario is somewhat different.</p> <p>The goal is storing received items from customers and reporting back on them. Although initial reports will be simple lists (these are your items and their key/value pairs) I want to prepare for future queries on the collections as a whole, so I'm uncertain EAV is a good approach.</p> <p>Each item is of a (recurring) type, and each item will have a flexible amount of key/value pairs. We have about 15 item types and they're not very likely to grow fast.</p> <p>The amount of key/value pairs will be low, between 4 and 20 and is (per requirement) <strong>not based on the item type, but on the customer the items belong to</strong>. </p> <p>To clarify, a customer might want me to store the condition of the item where another might want me to store the color or a replacement-id. It really depends. So it is very likely I will have NULL values in my set anyway as each item type will get all the key/values of that customer anyway. That makes me think <em>Single Table Inheritance</em> (with NULL values) is acceptable, but it would have to be field_1 field_2 etc - with some sort of mapping because the customer will decide on name of their desired key(s). Which doesn't seem right to me?</p> <p>A collection of customer items (and their key/values) will usually be >20 and &lt;500, so the data sets per customer are certainly not enormous.</p> <p>Perhaps it would be good approach to go (semi)EAV in MySQL for the application itself (creating the customer and their desired fields) but move the actual collected item records as a 'document' into a NoSQL database (Redis et all) for further processing? </p> <p>Or is that over complicating things that can/should be solved in a RDBMS?</p> <p>I also came across this <a href="http://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql" rel="noreferrer">http://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql</a> which seems like a solution but not sure since my numbers are so low. </p>
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