Question

I have to design a database that stores products with variable number of properties, for example:

id: 1 , name : bacon , wg: 2 , pack: 6, brand: “meat co.” , country: “canada”, etc

I can design this:

1. |id, keyword, value | for each keyword and then a crazy number of joins to show the data in a table
2. |id, col1,col2,col3,col4,metadata| and then do unknown magic to query the metadata with XML or JSON
3. your guess

Please guide me in this.

note: I’m using LAMP and PERL

Answer 1

You can define a table that has products and another table that has product properties.

The product properties table can contain 3 columns. Such as product_id,product property name and value, so you can add n number of product specific properties to this table. Without exploding the joins.

In summary two tables.

Product 
 - Product_id
 - Product_name
Product Properties.
 - Product_id
 -Property_id
 -Property_name
 -Property_value

So essentially this design will allow you to scale the number of properties for a product.