Using XML field Vs. creating a table for unstable organization

Question

I am in the middle of design an application to issue and store invoices for an organization. The problem is the organization is not stable at all. There are many types of invoic

Answer 1

we are using such approach already few years, but in combination with nhibernate. it's work perfect for web stores, and right you have to modify data layer. But you can create a custom project, with new model definition (IoContainer usual helps to resolve dependencies).

Ideal to sore important data into separate columns, but rest, dynamic content - into one XML column. All queries have to work only with table columns (for best performance). To obtain rest data we have an entity base class which in background serialize and de-serialize data into the rest of the "virtual" fields.

To increase application performance even more, we are using internal searcher/crawlers, which returns data much faster than communication with database.

Because nhibernate doesn't support (natively) linq - right now i am looking for an alternative, already implemented variant for entity framework.

If somebody have information to share - please, will be good to look & check (& compare with our variant - to choose better one)...