An Adventure with the Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) data model
Presented by:
Mark Wong
Mark Wong is a Software Development Engineer at EDB. He is also a Major Contributor to PostgreSQL.
No video of the event yet, sorry!
This is a tale about one company's experience with a database schema design refactor to use the Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) data model on its members. I will describe the original data model and why there was a need to move to a new data model, which the EAV was chosen for. This decision was made without realizing that the EAV data model is considered an anti-pattern for relational data modeling. There was some stumbling along the way but the company recovered and succeeded in implementing the EAV data model with some on-the-fly data transformation. The moral of the story really is to not use the EAV data model, but changing the data model is not always trivial. Hopefully this story can still help make the EAV data model bearable in the short term.
- Date:
- 2025 October 17 13:20 +11
- Duration:
- 40 min
- Room:
- Taylor
- Conference:
- PG Down Under 2025
- Language:
- Track:
- Development
- Difficulty:
- Medium