Most databases for open source platforms are quite simple in comparison to Magento's. For instance, in the past, when one designed e-commerce systems from scratch, it was likely that a simple relational model would suffice: one table for products that would contain all the key information relating to that product, such as price, available quantity, description, weight, and so on. The challenge with this traditional approach was that if we needed to add a new product attribute, such as height, that field would have to be added to the product table, thereby making previous versions incompatible and complicating any upgrade path.

In order for Magento to be a truly scalable platform, its developers utilize an Entity, Attribute and Value (EAV), or Sparse Matrix, architecture. This database structure adds a great deal of complexity to the Magento data model to be sure, but its advantage is its ability to allow an unlimited number of attributes to be added to any core item, such...