Value anti-pattern

It seems painfully common that software engineers decide to build a database on top of a relational database. Your lovely RDBMS can model columns, relations (duh), datatypes in a wonderful way and do all sort of clever optimisations when you query this data. When the wunderkind decides to have a table with columns name and value, to stuff any old rubbish in, they throw away all this good stuff and invent a very broken wheel on top of a very good wheel. Alfresco CMS manages to make very simple things very complicated and slow by using this pattern.