Inheritance in Database Design

Question

I am designing a new laboratory database with MANY types of my main entities.

The table for each entity will hold fields common to ALL types of that entity (entity_i

Answer 1

Oracle can deal with sparsely filled tables quite well. I think you can use a similar approach as company salesforce uses. They use tables with a lot of columns, they create columns when needed. You can index those columns much better than an eav model.

So it is flexible but it performs better than an eav model.

Read: Ask Tom 1, Ask Tom 2, High Scalabilty and SalesForce.