Arnold Daniels has posted some thoughts on a topics recently featured in a cover story by php|architect - EAV modeling.

I had seen this db structure in other project, but didn't know that it was called EAV. For those who don't read php|architect, EAV describes a method of saving a large set of attributes, only some of which apply to an individual entity. Normally you would create a table, with a row for each entity and save each attribute in a column. With EAV you save each attribute as a row.

He suggests two ways to do the modeling - the more "common" way and an alternative way that splits up the data types to make querying simpler (into scalars and arrays). A sample database structure and example query for it are included.