Hello Stackoverflow comunity!

I believe that my question has to do with all db guru here!

Do you know the EAV DB Scheme ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model ) and what they say about the performing of this model.

I wonder, If I break this model into smaller tables what the result is?

Let's talk about it.

I have a db with more that 100K records. A lot of categories and many items ( with different properties per category ) Everything is stored in a EAV.

If I try to break this scheme and create for any category a unique table is something that will I have to avoid?

Yes, I know that probably I'll have a lot of tables and I'll need to ALTER them if I want to add an extra field, BUT is this so wrong?

I have also read that as many tables I have, the db will be populate with more files and this isn't good for any filesystem.

Any suggestion?

Thank you!