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Asked: 2026-06-17T12:32:54+00:00

I’m going to code a housekeeping book So I create properties in code like

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I’m going to code a housekeeping book

So I create properties in code like Name, Category and some other need to create at run-time.

So how should I save that human-readable in a SQL Server database?

My suggestion is to create a table called Properties with 2 columns (Id, Name) and in that table I can store all my properties but it wouldn’t anymore human-readable

I also not sure if it will be wise to create a column for each property in one big table

I could also create a XML “file” and store this in my DB but i don’t thing this is a good idea either

Any advice is greatly appreciated

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There are basically three approached to this
    A column for every value

    The one you are suggesting which is called an Entity Attribute Value model

    Or the one you discounted which would be xml (or serialised objects)

    They all have pros and cons, and some of the cons can get quite severe.

    A column for every value means you have to change your db and model every time you want to store more data, which makes it very fragile and high maintenance.

    EAV can easily lead to the queries becoming huge joins, and imposing data integrity on it is a hiding to nothing.

    Object based can also lead to significant optimisation and maintenance issues, having to open every object to see if something is in it, for instance.

    Now any one of these might be the best of a bad lot at the time you make the decision (they are all fragile in one respect or another), IF you insist on using a relational database.

    Look at one of the NoSQL alternatives, they are designed for this sort of data.

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