I am currently working to rework the data system of our application. Basically, it is designed so that people can add all the custom fields they want, with only a few constant/always-there fields.
Our current design is giving us plenty of maintenance problems. What we do is dynamically(at runtime) add a column to the database for each field. We have to have a meta table and other cruft to maintain all of these dynamic columns.
Now we are looking at EAV, but it doesn't seem much better. Basically, we have many different types of fields, so there would be a StringValues, IntegerValues, etc table... which makes things that much worse.
I am wondering if using JSON or XML blobs in the database may be a better solution, specifically because in most use cases, when we retrieve anything out of these tables, we need the entire row. The problems is that we need to be able to create reports for this data as well.. No solution really makes custom queries look easy. And searching across such a blob database will surely be a performance nightmare when reports are ran.
Each "row" needs to have anywhere from about 15 to 100(possibly more) attributes/columns associated with it.
We are using SQL Server 2008 and our application interfacing with the database is a C# web application(so, ASP.Net).
what do you think? Use EAV or blobs or something else entirely? (Also, yes, I know a schema free database like MongoDB would be awesome here, but I can't convince my boss to use it)
What about the xml datatype? Advanced querying is possible against this type.
We've used the xml type with good success. We do most of our heavy lifting at the code level using linq to parse out values. Our schema is somewhat fixed, so that may not be an option for you.