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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-19T09:00:03+00:00

I’m working with a client who has a piece of custom website software that

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I’m working with a client who has a piece of custom website software that has something I haven’t seen before. It has a MySQL Database backend, but most of the tables are auto-generated by the php code. This allows end-users to create tables and fields as they see fit. So it’s a database within a database, but obviously without all the features available in the ‘outermost’ database. There are a couple tables that are basically mappings of auto-generated table names and fields to user-friendly table names and fields.* This makes queries feel very unintuitive 😛

They are looking for some additional features, ones that are immediately available when you use the database directly, such as data type enforcement, foreign keys, unique indexes, etc. But since this a database within a database, all those features have to be added into the php code that runs the database. The first thing that came to my mind is Inner Platform Effect* — but I don’t see a way to get out of database emulation and still provide them with the features they need!

I’m wondering, could I create a system that gives users nerfed ability to create ‘real’ tables, thus gaining all the relational features for free? In the past, it’s always been the developer/admin who made the tables, and then the users did CRUD operations through the application. I just have an uncomfortable feeling about giving users access to schema operations, even when it is through the application. I’m in uncharted territory.

Is there a name for this kind of system? Internally, in the code, this is called a ‘collection’ system. The name of ‘virtual’ tables and fields within the database is called a ‘taxonomy’. Is this similiar to CCK or the taxonomy modules in Drupal? I’m looking for models of software that do this kind of this, so I can see what the pitfalls and benefits are. Basically I’m looking for more outside information about this kind of system.

  • Note this is not a simple key-value mapping, as the wikipedia article on inner-platform effect references. These work like actual tuples of multiple cells — like simple database tables.
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  1. Editorial Team

    I’ve done this, you can make it pretty simple or go completely nuts with it. You do run into problems though when you put it into customers’ hands, are we going to ask them to figure out primary keys, unique constraints and foreign keys?

    So assuming you want to go ahead with that in mind, you need some type of data dictionary, aka meta-data repository. You have a start, but you need to add the ideas that columns are collected into tables, then specify primary and foreign keys.

    After that, generating DDL is fairly trivial. Loop through tables, loop through columns, build a CREATE TABLE command. The only hitch is you need to sequence the tables so that parents are created before children. That is not hard, implement a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_ordering

    At the second level, you first have to examine the existing database and then sometimes only issue ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN… commands. So it starts to get complicated.

    Then things continue to get more complicated as you consider allowing DEFAULTS, specifying indexes, and so on. The task is finite, but can be much larger than it seems.

    You may wish to consider how much of this you really want to support, and then make a value judgment about coding it up.

    My triangulum project does this: http://code.google.com/p/triangulum-db/ but it is only at Alpha 2 and I would not recommend using it in a Production situation just yet.

    You may also look at Doctrine, http://www.doctrine-project.org/, they have some sort of text-based dictionary to build databases out of, but I’m not sure how far they’ve gone with it.

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