I need to create a table of attributes where each record is essentially just a name-value pair. The problem is that the value can be a string, integer or decimal and I'm using MySQL which doesn't support table inheritance. So, the question is - should I create a separate table for each value type or should I just create str\_value, int\_value and dec\_value columns with an additional value\_type column that tells you which type to use? There won't be many records in this table (less than 100), so performance shouldn't be much of an issue, but I just don't want to make a design decision that's going to make the SQL more complex than it has to be.