How to Recognize the Antipattern
If you hear phrases like the following spoken by your project team, it’s a clue that someone is employing the EAV antipattern:
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“This database is totally extensible without metadata changes. You can define new attributes at runtime.”
Relational databases don’t support that degree of flexibility. When someone claims to have designed an arbitrarily extensible database, they’re probably using the EAV design.
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“What’s the maximum number of joins I can do in a query?”
If you need a query to support such a high number of joins that you’re concerned about exceeding the database’s limits, you may have a problem in your database design. It’s common for an EAV design to lead to this problem.
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“I can’t figure out ...
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