How to design a product table for many kinds of product where each product has many parameters

Question

I do not have much experience in table design. My goal is to create one or more product tables that meet the requirements below:

• Support many kinds of produ

Answer 1

You can have a Product table and a separate ProductAdditionInfo table with 3 columns: product ID, additional info name, additional info value. If color is used by many but not all kinds of Products you could have it be a nullable column in the Product table, or just put it in ProductAdditionalInfo.

This approach is not a traditional technique for a relational database, but I have seen it used a lot in practice. It can be flexible and have good performance.

Steve Yegge calls this the Properties pattern and wrote a long post about using it.