Storing data in your applications is a recurring task. But what happens when the structure of the data needs to change without redeploying? For example:

- E-commerce products with different attribute combinations
- Dynamic form values configured by users
- Different sets of metrics on monitored services

To solve this problem, we can use the (unloved) Entity-Attribute-Value data model. But why is it considered an anti-pattern by some developers? Let’s see together how this problem has been solved by different PHP projects like Sylius or Drupal and how Symfony can solve (of course it does) related major problems.