Database tables with dynamic information

Posted by Tim Fennis on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Tim Fennis
Published on 2010-06-16T17:17:36Z Indexed on 2010/06/16 17:22 UTC
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database-design

I've googled this and found that it's almost impossible to create a database with dynamic collumns. I'll explain my problem first.

I am making a webshop for a customer. It has multiple computer products for sale. CPU's HDD's RAM ect. All these products have different properties, a CPU has an FSB, RAM has a CAS latency. But this is very inconvenient because my orders table needs foreign keys to different tables which is impossible.

An other option is to store all the product specific information in a varchar or blob field and let PHP figure it out. The problem with this solution is that the website needs a PC builder. A step-by-step guide to building your PC. So for instance if a customer decides he wants a new "i7 920" or whatever i want to be able to sellect all motherboards for socket 1366, which is impossible because all the data is stored in one field. I know it's possible to select all motherboards form the DB and let PHP figure out which ones are for socket 1366 but i was wondering,

is there a better solution?

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