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I recently read The Pragmatic Programmers book SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming (http://pragprog.com/book/bksqla/sql-antipatterns) and chapter 6 talks specifically about this kind of DB design (entity-attribute-value) and the benefits/pitfalls. It's a great read and I highly recommend it.

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I bought that book after my first time developing on top of Magento.

Pure curiosity: Do you know of any other OSS projects that went down this route?

Yeah, I'd been thinking "Magento" from about halfway into that article.

Wordpress uses the EAV db pattern too (have a look at the wp_options and wp_meta tables).

Of course, Magento and Wordpress use it in fundamentally different ways - so this project I've got to build a combined search across a site with both Magento (EAV for products) and Wordpress (non-EAV for posts/pages) in use, is in that "it'll sit on the backburner until it becomes critical or somebody else solves it for me first" state…

Squiz's Matrix (open-source CMS) also uses an EAV model.

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