用户创建的数据存储在类似表的结构中

Question

I have an asp.net 4.0 c# application where a user is now going to be able to create a table and store data in that table. One thing that has been decided for version 1 is once the table is created it can't be edited this is purely for making it less complicated. It would be nice to have a solution to where the schema could be edited also.

My first thought is to have a table in the db and each row would represent each "table", one column would store the schema in xml and then a second column would store the data. When trying to pull the data I would read the xml into a datatable work with the data and then save it back out to xml in the db. Any thoughts suggestions or links to others trying this would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There are many ways to do it:

1. You can generate real table via "create table" sqls. This would give you the best performance, but would be a nightmare from DB administrator point of view. Don't do this if you're inexperienced.

2. Make tables: MyTable, MyColumn, MyRow and MyCell.

   • MyTable would have MyTableID (primary key) and Name,
   • MyColumn would have MyColumnID (primary key), MyTableID (foreign key), Name
   • MyRow would have MyRowID (primary key), MyTableID (foreign key)
   • MyCell would have MyCellID (primary key), MyColumnID (foreign key), MyRowID (foreign key) and Value (big variable length string)

   This way you would at least be able to use SQL to query, search and modify your data and performance would be better than with XML (although not nearly as good as when you use "create table" SQL).

3. You can use NoSQL database. Many of them don't have rigid structure and can store something like JSON, so you can store practically everything in them. There are many downsides in this solution (such as absence of SQL and no ACID transaction integrity), but maybe it would work in your case. Start with What NoSQL solutions are out there for .NET?