I need to design a database for a web application. Customization needs to be implemented, any ides/suggestions how can this be done in MySQL database.
This is my first design, so please help.

Thanks in advance,
Joe

What do you mean "Customization needs to be implemented"?

Web application needs customization, want to implement most of it in database. With creating proper tables and relations between them, or maybe create few generic tables and make other use them again and again, so that whenever the application user decides to change something online, very little needs to be done in the database side.
Hope that was clear enough.

Thanks.

Oracle 9i has something called relation-object design. Is there anything similar that can be implemented in MySQL?
Any help is appreciated.

So you want the web designers to be able to store whatever kind of data they want (no structure at all)?

In a crude sense yes. But we would limit the amount of customizability (maintaing the basic sturcture). And these changes could be done only by certain users.

Thanks

I once had to design an extremely flexible flat-file database for a client, who needed the ability to define fields at will (not only text but numbers too).

I settled upon a table called schema which defined the fields, and a table called user_fields which contained the information. Each row was a tuple:

{ record_number, field_number, text_value, numeric_value }

The user's input would be stored in numeric as well as text form if the input could be translated to a number; otherwise it was only text.

It took a wee bit o' programming to make this all work, but work it did, and surprisingly well.