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by strommen 3572 days ago
EAV is an anti-pattern?

If you don't have JSONB, EAV is the only remotely-reasonable way to implement user-defined fields (e.g. product-specific attributes in e-commerce).

1 comments

If you want to allow user-defined fields in a relational database, your realistic are either EAV or stuff json into a text column. EAV, if done extremely carefully, can be a good solution, but 99% of the time, it's going to be a huge pain.
> stuff json into a text column

You did see the article was about JSONB, which is significantly more sophisticated than "json in a text column", yes?

Yes, the person I was replying to was asking about what to do if you don't have jsonb.