feedback to php|arch article

I noticed a couple of blog posts written in response to my (somewhat) recent php|arch article:

• An alternative way of EAV modeling
• EAV Modeling - Square Peg in a Round Hole?

Reading these was initially discouraging, as both authors are critical of the concept of my article. Although I don't necessarily agree with them, they both make good points in their posts, and I encourage you to read them both if you are interested in the topic. I particularly appreciate the point about table-level locking in MyISAM tables, and how that might affect performance in the frequently-updated value tables.

Although this is not a very useful rebuttal, about all I can say is that the EAV method has worked well for me. As with anything, your mileage may vary. I'm not running reddit or facebook, and the systems I've built on EAV don't have thousands of simultaneous users. So I really can't say how well it would perform in a large-scale deployment.

After I sort of got over being defensive about the whole thing, I'm just glad that people found the article interesting enough to talk about it.