Entity–attribute–value model

The entity–attribute–value model (EAV) is a way to store data for things that have different properties. It's like having a lot of labeled drawers in a big closet. You can put things with different properties in each drawer. In the EAV model, the drawers are called entities, the labels on the drawers are called attributes, and the things inside the drawers are called values. So, if you were using EAV to store information about a person, you might make drawers labelled “name”, “age”, “address”, etc. In each drawer you could put the actual values, like “John Smith”, “35”, and “123 Main Street”.