Hi db gurus,

I have a dilema. The software system communicates to different devices at shopfloor and captures different parameters from them. I'm trying to design a table set for RDBMS to keep this parameters and relate them to processed order and workstation. The problem is that I cannot find the proper way of how to store captured parameters from different devices that I even don't know about. Table set should be generic (I don't want to change it in future) but the set of supported devices and their parameters can very fro case to case (new customer will require to capture another data).
Could someone advise what's the best way to make this storage generic. What is the best practice if any exists?
From one side I thought about creating a table with PARAMETER_NAME->PARAMETER_VALUE relationship. But I'm not happy with this approach.
On the other hand I can imagine a table where all parameters are stored in different fields (10 varchar fields, 10 integer,.....). But I'm not happy of this approach as well 'couse I have an experience when suddenly the amount of fields is not enough but I don't want to extand table as it's not easy to support different structures from project to project.
I guess this task should be very common and somebody faced it already and might help me.

Please advise.

Regards.
Yuri.