For sure. Performance has not been anywhere near as big a challenge as my own productivity. This EAV approach has enabled me to do at least more than an order

For sure. Performance has not been anywhere near as big a challenge as my own productivity. This EAV approach has enabled me to do at least more than an order of magnitude more solutions for customers in the same time. I basically manage 2 EAV databases - a production one with the 7 tables (discussed) and a development one with the same 7 tables, where I will do imports, migrations, and such. One thing that is truly chaos is when you have hundreds of "virtual" EAV tables with 10's of millions of records (or more) in just 7 tables .... and the house of cards comes down for whatever reason (master-master replication failure, clustering failure etc). Gives you a whole new appreciation of the beauty of a simple flat file database.