Entity Attribute Value Database vs. strict Relational Model Ecommerce

Question

It is safe to say that the EAV/CR database model is bad. That said,

Question: What database model, technique, or pattern should be used to deal with \"clas

Answer 1

I'm struggling with the same issue. It may be interesting for you to check out the following discussion on two existing ecommerce solutions: Magento (EAV) and Joomla (regular relational structure): https://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=58686.0

It seems, that Magento's EAV performance is a real showstopper.

That's why I'm leaning towards a normalized structure. To overcome the lack of flexibility I'm thinking about adding some separate data dictionary in the future (XML or separate DB tables) that could be edited, and based on that, application code for displaying and comparing product categories with new attributes set would be generated, together with SQL scripts.

Such architecture seems to be the sweetspot in this case - flexible and performant at the same time.

The problem could be frequent use of ALTER TABLE in live environment. I'm using Postgres, so its MVCC and transactional DDL will hopefully ease the pain.