Supporting a Sparse Property Design in SQL Server 2008

Sparse properties (also known as open schema or entity attribute-value) is a type of design that is traditionally difficult to optimize in a relational database. This occurs when the number of different attributes that can be used to design an entity are large and the attributes themselves are variable. This talk will enumerate the different design possibilities as well as describe in detail some SQL Server 2008 features (sparse columns, filtered indexes, and filtered statistics) that are meant to make such a system more optimizable.