Inheritance in Database Design

Question

I am designing a new laboratory database with MANY types of my main entities.

The table for each entity will hold fields common to ALL types of that entity (entity_i

Answer 1

The "Option 1" patterns is also called the "Universal Relation" At first look it seems like a short cut to not doing potentially difficult data modeling. It trades effortless data modeling for not being able to do simple select, update, delete without dramatically more effort than it would take on more usual looking data model with multiple tables.