Database schema-related problem

Question

I have a kind of theoretical question about databases. To make it more concrete I have thought up an example case.

Suppose I have a store with products. I have lots

Answer 1

Initially I'd have suggested you have a productproperty table to model the relationship between products and properties. This would allow you to associate many products with a particular property.

However, I'm not keen on the idea of having a value stored alongside each property as a 1:1. It might be best if you have a propertyvalue table that associates a property with a value. Then, you'd ditch the productproperty table in favour of having a richer productpropertyvalue table which could fully describe the relationship between a product, it's properties and their values.

Perhaps then you could have the following:

product => (ID (unique key), Name, Description)
property => (ID (unique key), Description)
propertyvalue => (ID (unique key), propertyID (foreign key), value)
productpropertyvalue => (ID (unique key), productID (foreign key), propertyValueID (foreign key))

Of course, property values could be complex rather than simple strings or integers, but hopefully this takes you in the right direction.