How to store site wide settings in a database?

Question

I\'m debating three different approaches to to storing sitewide settings for a web application.

A key/value pair lookup table, each key represents a setting.

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Answer 1

Go with #1. If you want constraints based on simple types, then rather than having a simple string as a value, add a date and number field as well. The individual properties will "know" what value they want. No reason to get all meta about it.