Ecommerce developers with Magento

If you install new version of Magento 1.4, you can see that existing differences in structures of eav attributes. Earlier all data of EAV attributes were in table eav_attribute, now in new version eav_attribute table is smaller, beacuse a lot of fileds moved in new tables.

One of the differences between Magento eCommerce platform and lets say WordPress, when looked from developer point of view, is “avoid raw queries” approach. For a web application, Magento is massive system. His database, although not so massive but surely breathtaking with around 220 tables forces you to use “eye candy” EAV model to do even simple things.

If you worked with osCommerce, Zen Cart, CRE Loaded or any similar eCommerce platform before, you might find Magento database structure quite confusing when you see it for the first time. I advise you not to rush too much figuring out what is what by glancing through database. Try to spend first few hours getting familiar with some background. For purposes of flexibility, the Magento database heavily utilizes an Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) data model. As is often the case, the cost of flexibility is complexity. Is there something in Magento that is simple from developers point of view?