How to design a product table for many kinds of product where each product has many parameters

Question

You have at least these five options for modeling the type hierarchy you describe:

• Single Table Inheritance: one table for all Product types, with enough columns to store all attributes of all types. This means a lot of columns, most of which are NULL on any given row.

• Class Table Inheritance: one table for Products, storing attributes common to all product types. Then one table per product type, storing attributes specific to that product type.

• Concrete Table Inheritance: no table for common Products attributes. Instead, one table per product type, storing both common product attributes, and product-specific attributes.

• Serialized LOB: One table for Products, storing attributes common to all product types. One extra column stores a BLOB of semi-structured data, in XML, YAML, JSON, or some other format. This BLOB allows you to store the attributes specific to each product type. You can use fancy Design Patterns to describe this, such as Facade and Memento. But regardless you have a blob of attributes that can't be easily queried within SQL; you have to fetch the whole blob back to the application and sort it out there.

• Entity-Attribute-Value: One table for Products, and one table that pivots attributes to rows, instead of columns. EAV is not a valid design with respect to the relational paradigm, but many people use it anyway. This is the "Properties Pattern" mentioned by another answer. See other questions with the eav tag on StackOverflow for some of the pitfalls.

I have written more about this in a presentation, Extensible Data Modeling.

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Additional thoughts about EAV: Although many people seem to favor EAV, I don't. It seems like the most flexible solution, and therefore the best. However, keep in mind the adage TANSTAAFL. Here are some of the disadvantages of EAV:

• No way to make a column mandatory (equivalent of NOT NULL).
• No way to use SQL data types to validate entries.
• No way to ensure that attribute names are spelled consistently.
• No way to put a foreign key on the values of any given attribute, e.g. for a lookup table.
• Fetching results in a conventional tabular layout is complex and expensive, because to get attributes from multiple rows you need to do JOIN for each attribute.

The degree of flexibility EAV gives you requires sacrifices in other areas, probably making your code as complex (or worse) than it would have been to solve the original problem in a more conventional way.

And in most cases, it's unnecessary to have that degree of flexibility. In the OP's question about product types, it's much simpler to create a table per product type for product-specific attributes, so you have some consistent structure enforced at least for entries of the same product type.

I'd use EAV only if every row must be permitted to potentially have a distinct set of attributes. When you have a finite set of product types, EAV is overkill. Class Table Inheritance would be my first choice.

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Update 2019: The more I see people using JSON as a solution for the "many custom attributes" problem, the less I like that solution. It makes queries too complex, even when using special JSON functions to support them. It takes a lot more storage space to store JSON documents, versus storing in normal rows and columns.

Basically, none of these solutions are easy or efficient in a relational database. The whole idea of having "variable attributes" is fundamentally at odds with relational theory.

What it comes down to is that you have to choose one of the solutions based on which is the least bad for your app. Therefore you need to know how you're going to query the data before you choose a database design. There's no way to choose one solution that is "best" because any of the solutions might be best for a given application.

@StoneHeart

I would go here with EAV and MVC all the way.

@Bill Karvin

Here are some of the disadvantages of EAV:

• No way to make a column mandatory (equivalent of NOT NULL).
• No way to use SQL data types to validate entries.
• No way to ensure that attribute names are spelled consistently.
• No way to put a foreign key on the values of any given attribute, e.g. for a lookup table.

All those things that you have mentioned here:

• data validation
• attribute names spelling validation
• mandatory columns/fields
• handling the destruction of dependent attributes

in my opinion don't belong in a database at all because none of databases are capable of handling those interactions and requirements on a proper level as a programming language of an application does.

In my opinion using a database in this way is like using a rock to hammer a nail. You can do it with a rock but aren't you suppose to use a hammer which is more precise and specifically designed for this sort of activity ?

Fetching results in a conventional tabular layout is complex and expensive, because to get attributes from multiple rows you need to do JOIN for each attribute.

This problem can be solved by making few queries on partial data and processing them into tabular layout with your application. Even if you have 600GB of product data you can process it in batches if you require data from every single row in this table.

Going further If you would like to improve the performance of the queries you can select certain operations like for e.g. reporting or global text search and prepare for them index tables which would store required data and would be regenerated periodically, lets say every 30 minutes.

You don't even need to be concerned with the cost of extra data storage because it gets cheaper and cheaper every day.

If you would still be concerned with performance of operations done by the application, you can always use Erlang, C++, Go Language to pre-process the data and later on just process the optimised data further in your main app.

If I use Class Table Inheritance meaning:

one table for Products, storing attributes common to all product types. Then one table per product type, storing attributes specific to that product type. -Bill Karwin

Which I like the best of Bill Karwin's Suggestions.. I can kind of foresee one drawback, which I will try to explain how to keep from becoming a problem.

What contingency plan should I have in place when an attribute that is only common to 1 type, then becomes common to 2, then 3, etc?

For example: (this is just an example, not my real issue)

If we sell furniture, we might sell chairs, lamps, sofas, TVs, etc. The TV type might be the only type we carry that has a power consumption. So I would put the power_consumption attribute on the tv_type_table. But then we start to carry Home theater systems which also have a power_consumption property. OK its just one other product so I'll add this field to the stereo_type_table as well since that is probably easiest at this point. But over time as we start to carry more and more electronics, we realize that power_consumption is broad enough that it should be in the main_product_table. What should I do now?

Add the field to the main_product_table. Write a script to loop through the electronics and put the correct value from each type_table to the main_product_table. Then drop that column from each type_table.

Now If I was always using the same GetProductData class to interact with the database to pull the product info; then if any changes in code now need refactoring, they should be to that Class only.

You can have a Product table and a separate ProductAdditionInfo table with 3 columns: product ID, additional info name, additional info value. If color is used by many but not all kinds of Products you could have it be a nullable column in the Product table, or just put it in ProductAdditionalInfo.

This approach is not a traditional technique for a relational database, but I have seen it used a lot in practice. It can be flexible and have good performance.

Steve Yegge calls this the Properties pattern and wrote a long post about using it.