What do you think of the Database design of Drupal/WordPress? They use 2 tables for 85% of the data!! Product, pages, whatever are all stored in the same 2 tables. Does that work out better than having each content type in separate tables?

I'm thinking of making an ERP. Would that table structure work there?

Both drupal & wordpress handle relatively small amounts of data so its probably more a case of flexibility.

Database design is all about prioritizing what is most important for the use cases.

A datawarehouse have a completely different structure from a shopping site or a cms or ...

What is right for one is often wrong for another.

And for high volume, high through put you might need multiple different databases and caching.

But unless you plan for enterprise or internet scale it probably makes most sense to use a fairly normalized database thats easy to work with.

You can always add caching or aggregation later. Its much more difficult to break things apart later :)

I will say it again, WordPress is shit.