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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-31T07:34:05+00:00

I’ve been thinking a lot trying to figure out how to make a flexible

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I’ve been thinking a lot trying to figure out how to make a flexible system to hold many values trying to avoid the option of adding more fields to table in the future.
The only thing I could think off, is to make a table that will look like this:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `form_data` (
    `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
    `name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
    `value` varchar(500) default NULL,
    `form_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
)

+--------+---------+----------+--------+
|   id   |  name   |  value   | form_id|
+--------+---------+----------+--------+
|  100   |fullname |  Steve   |   1    |
+--------+---------+----------+--------+
|  101   |email    |ab@c.com  |   1    |
+--------+---------+----------+--------+
|  102   |fullname |  John    |   1    |
+--------+---------+----------+--------+
|  103   |email    |cd@c.com  |   1    |
+--------+---------+----------+--------+

This way, I could save each value in a row, and it would be as dynamic as I’d want.
I’m aware of the bad performance in a very long tables.

Now I’ve also figured out how to make the View(front end) of the values in a “Regular” table. Looks just like a normal table.

+--------+---------+----------+
|  ID    | Email   |Fullname  |
+--------+---------+----------+
|   1    |ab@c.com | Steve    |
+--------+---------+----------+
|   2    |cd@c.com | John     |
+--------+---------+----------+

Now I want to create a temporary table instead of PHP loops.
Any ideas how to make this work?
How do I create a stored procedure that will receive the form_id as parameter and will return a table like this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Congratulations. You have re-invented the Entity-Attribute-Value model.

    This model has existed for quite a while, but has proven to perform quite bad in a relational database system. You should probably not use it.

    This answer makes a nice list of the pro and cons of EAV. The biggest pro is what you have discovered, it’s easier to design. The biggest con is what I’m telling here: it’s worse on performance.

    Since usually you design far less often than your queries run, it might be better to think a bit longer while designing, and have faster queries.

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