What is EAV in Magento?

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EAV stands for Entity Attribute Value. It is a technique that facilitates users to add unlimited columns to their table virtually.

In Magento, EAV stands for Entity-Attribute-Value. It’s a data modeling pattern used to enable flexibility in defining attributes for entities (such as products, customers, categories) without the need to modify the database schema.

Here’s a more detailed explanation:

  1. Entity: An entity represents the object being modeled, such as a product, customer, or category.
  2. Attribute: An attribute represents a property or characteristic of the entity. Examples of attributes for a product could be its name, price, color, etc.
  3. Value: The value represents the actual data associated with a particular attribute for a specific entity. For example, the value of the “color” attribute for a product might be “blue”.

Magento uses EAV model primarily for product attributes. This allows merchants to add custom attributes to products without needing to alter the database schema. It provides great flexibility and scalability, especially in scenarios where there are a large number of attributes with varying data types. However, EAV can also introduce complexity in querying and performance overhead due to its dynamic nature.