Question

I think my question might be unclear , but i would try to explain it by example .

say that we had about 100 different car model , clearly all of the car would share common parts or specification but not all parts are shared between all of these 100 car brands

what is the best practice of storing these specification in this case ??

my idea was to store the most common specification in each column and the undetermined ( the rest )specification could be saved or serialized array as object or array .

doctrine simplify this operation by these datatypes (array-object)
do you think this is good idea or could you please share with me your experience

here is my idea in 2 simple tables

Table 1
|-------|--------|-------|-------|-------|
| Id    | brand  |engine |desiel | blah..|
|-------|--------|-------|-------|-------|
| 1     | old car|   1.6 | yes   | blah..|
|-------|--------|-------|-------|-------|


Table 2 
|-------|--------|----------------------|
| Id    | car_id |  un common info      |
|-------|--------|----------------------|
| 1     |    1   |array of informations |
|-------|--------|----------------------|

i think my idea bad because it breaks the search ability

Answer 1

Possibly want you need an Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) schema. These can let you have records with varying amounts of information, but can be tricky to query.