drawbacks of storing all ''things' in a central table

Posted by naiquevin on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by naiquevin
Published on 2011-01-11T07:49:07Z Indexed on 2011/01/11 7:53 UTC
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Hi,

I am not sure if there is a term to describe this, but I have observed that content management systems store all kinds of data in a single table with their bare minimum properties while the meta data is stored in another table in form of key value pairs.

for eg. everything (blog posts, pages, images, events etc) is stored in one table and considered as a post.

I understand that this allows for abstraction and easy extensibility

we are considering designing our new project this way. It is not exactly a CMS but we plan to keep adding modules to it in stages. Lets say initially there will be only posts and images on which comments can be posted. Later on we might add videos which will also have the commenting feature.

what are the drawbacks of this approach ? and will it work for a requirement like ours ?

Thanks

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