Custom fields schema

[Nick Barnes]

At 2005-01-27 13:54:20+0000, Myk Melez writes:

> And I disagree that most people have approved of your design.  I count 
> only Joel Peshkin, Maxwell Kanat-Alexander, Shane H. W. Travis, 
> Christopher Hicks as having expressed a clear opinion in support of your 
> solution in this thread, while Gervase Markham and Vlad Dascalu both 
> seem to oppose it, and John Fisher, Kevin Benton, Bradley Baetz, and 
> Nick Barnes have not expressed a clear position either way.

FWIW, I like Sean's design.  I think it's acceptable from a database
design standpoint, but mainly it's infinitely better than any
alternative because it represents actual working code right now, and
is therefore a realistic candidate for actually getting into the trunk
before we all die of old age.

I've said before that getting working code into the trunk, given a
half-way reasonable [*] design and some thought about extensibility
[*2], should trump everything, including a degree of performance.

Nick B

[*] Yes, I know that this whole discussion revolves around a
disagreement over what constitutes "reasonable" here.

[*2] to address the huge wishlist of custom-field features,
e.g. multiple datatypes, per-product fields, access controls,
multi-selects, interactive form design, makes the tea.