6nf

Take three layers of information: Layer 1: Information This layer contains data with UNIQUE natural indexes and a surrogate key that is easily transferrable. Table Surnames: +-----------------------------+--------------+ | ID (Auto Increment, PK) | Surname | +-----------------------------+--------------+ | 1 | Smith | | 2 | Edwards | | 3 | Brown | +-----------------------------+--------------+ Table FirstNames +-----------------------------+--------------+ | ID (Auto Increment, PK) | FirstName | +-----------------------------+--------------+ | 1 | John | | 2 | Bob | | 3 | Mary | | 4 | Kate | +

Intro I have been reading about EAV database and most of the short comings seem to be related to really, really, bad EAV designs or difficulty generating reports from the data . Usually when you see people complaining about EAV they are using less than three tables to try to replicate the functionally of separate tables + columns in a RDBMS. Sometimes that means storing everything from decimals to strings in a single TEXT value column. EAV also messes with the safe-guards over data integrity which can be very bad if you are not careful. However, EAV does provide an easy way to track historical