Today someone on Hacker News posted a link to the Wikipedia article on the inner-platform effect, which is “the tendency of software architects to create a system so customizable as to become a replica, and often a poor replica, of the software development platform they are using.”

One of my favorite parts of the article (emphasis mine):

In the database world, developers are sometimes tempted to bypass the RDBMS, for example by storing everything in one big table with two columns labelled key and value. While this entity-attribute-value model allows the developer to break out from the structure imposed by an SQL database, it loses out on all the benefits, since all of the work that could be done efficiently by the RDBMS is forced onto the application instead. Queries become much more convoluted, the indexes and query optimizer can no longer work effectively, and data validity constraints are not enforced. Such designs rarely make their way into real world production systems, however, because performance tends to be little better than abysmal, due to all the extra joins required.

Oh man, if only. I can think of at least one example of a a platform with this very problem — and with the associated horrible performance profile — that is very widely deployed and used in production environments around the world. I’m sure you can think of others.