[ludston]

I'm interested in understanding what you mean. What is "OR" shaped data? Are you thinking of data like, "The staff member must have either a salary or an hourly rate"?

Typically I would see this modelled with two db columns, with a DB constraint indicating that only one of these can have a value.

[throwaway894345]

That’s generally what I’m talking about, and it works well enough for simple cases, but these sorts of solutions tend not to scale well and you give up type safety. Not the end of the world, just disappointing.