Why not simply create a table "properties", with three fields: id, key and value? 

File     Property
.id      .id
.name    .file
.size    .key
.type    .value

[download]
You can decide yourself which propertise are important enough for in the File table, but I'd just put almost all in Property, for ease of programming: 
File     Property
.id      .id
.name    .file
.type    .key
.size    .value
.parent

File
id   name   type   size   parent 
1    ROOT   DIR    NULL   NULL
42   foo    FILE   123    1

Property
id   file   key            value 
9    42     content_type   image/x-xyzzy
10   42     width          1024
11   42     height         768
13   42     bpp            16

[download]
This, with the glue to make it automatic in Perl (which you could even do with AUTOLOAD), seems much easier to me, and can work with non-mysql databases.

Growing tables horizontally automatically is a crime, as much as having indexes in table or column names is.

Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }

In reply to Re: RFC: How to name it? DBIx::Table::Denormalized, DBIx::Table::Dynamic, ... by Juerd
in thread RFC: How to name it? DBIx::Table::Denormalized, DBIx::Table::Dynamic, ... by Corion

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