Hey all, I'm a bit of a newb in terms of programming database schema.

However, my friend believes he has discovered a new era in database architecture.

Here are the basics. There are two tables in a database:

There's one table, 2 columns where each horizontal row is a TYPE of data (for example, you'd have one record be name, another address, another phone) and each row has a unique ID assiged to that type.

In another table there is just row after row of data. For example, you'd have 2 columns, one would be data, like Joey H, and the other column would be the id number assigned to a name data type.

Example:

Table 1:
15 - Name
16 - Address
17 - Email

Table 2:
Joey - 15
Paul - 15
905 Belair Dr. - 16
hdog@WAAA.edu - 17
1600 Pennsylvania Av. - 16
Juan - 15

I swear I've read of this type of database architecture before, but I can't find it again, and I want to get more info about it. The problem is I dont know what it's called, so it's hard to find information about it.

I thought I had read it with regards to frameworks, and things of that nature, and the separation of data, back end, and front end or something. I was checking out info on wikipedia and there was also info on database types that was similar (network databases, relational databases), but I dont think either of those were like what I'm talking about.

The obvious advantage to this system would be scalability of the database. It'd be easy to add new 'fields' or data types to the database without drastically changing the structure of the database, ideal for making dynamically generated web forms or something of that nature.

My other concern would be that even if this system were implemented, it would become overwhelmingly slow as the one table with all the data grew to a tremendous size.

Hopefully this description immediately sparks the name in one of your overwhelmingly large minds. Any help or a point in the right direction would be of great use. Thanks!

it's called EAV (entity-attribute-value) and also OTLT (one true lookup table)

it has serious problems, which you may read about in tony andrew's article

Ahh thanks so much!

The classic newbie doom scenario! If anyone else has more arguements on this, that'd be wonderful.

but if you tell us which server you use for database.then i thik i tell you some thing.

We're newbies! Our database is mysql. I think that's what you're asking?