However if you really want to do it your way a possible workaround is to add a meta field you can use for ordering, if one field doesn’t solve the complexity you could build a seperate table that contains structure for each different type and have your table just be a masterrecord of all info…

Like for a tree struc…
http://fungus.teststation.com/~jon/treehandling/TreeHandling.htm

Doing this with a OR/M might be a good idea depending on preformance. So now instead of searching the masterrecord your searching a path and you hook up a callback in the OR/M record to pull objects as their needed? If any record is needed right away you could also do a JOIN or something…

just a thought, nobody will probably read this… the internet gobbles up more of my words. :D

Now if you had a table that could take a class construct via ReflectionClass and automatically create a table to break the object apart and store it. You would almost have to build a query language to handle searching though. Something like new SerializedSearch(‘DateObj’, ‘year = “2005″‘);

It could all work, just one of those “would it really be useful” things… Still – it’s interesting to think about :)

$stmt = sprintf(‘SELECT name FROM table WHERE date = “%s”‘,
$dao->escape($dateObj->serialize()));

Of course, if you’re using a builder of some sort to build the query for you, the code would be:

$stmt->addWhere($dateObj);

And $stmt->execute() would know that any thing added via addWhere() has a serialize() method – class hinting would be the thing here – require a Serializable interface in addWhere. I may play around with this a bit more – sounds like it would be an interesting way to store data. I’m curious how much (if any) of a performance hit this would cause.

CREATE TABLE prefs (
key VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
value VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
owner_id INT);

Its similar to your straight text approach, except I’m taking it one step further. Prior to any data being stored in the value field, I’m running it through serialize(). You could take the same approach you’re using and run the data through serialize(), then when you application unserialize()’s it on the other end, it would be ready to use. This becomes extremely useful when you’re using an OO-approach. Your datetime example above could come straight out of the database as a DateTime object of your creation.

Of course, that ties you down to PHP, but if that’s where you’re intending to use the data. And I imagine it wouldn’t be that difficult to write an unserialize() method to port it to other languages.