title: "User Preferences" Database Table Design
body: <p>I'm looking to create a table for user preferences and can't figure the best way to do it.  The way that the ASP.NET does it by default seems extremely awkward, and would like to avoid that.  Currently, I'm using one row per user, where I have a different column for each user preference (not normalized, I know).</p>
  
  <p>So, the other idea that I had come up with was to split the Preferences themselves up into their own table, and then have a row PER preference PER user in a user preferences table; however, this would mean each preference would need to be the exact same datatype, which also doesn't sound too appealing to me.</p>
  
  <p>So, my question is: What is the best/most logical way to design a database to hold user preference values?</p>