At that point you might as well just make an "Addresses" or "Address" table with a raw text field for the address. At the end of the day this thing is something that a human will read and map to the real world location.
> At the end of the day this thing is something that a human will read and map to the real world location.
That is quite an assumption.
I personally would use a field with a structured format e.g. XML (most RDBMS systems can deal with XML easily) and different types of address field e.g. postcode, zip code etc.
Then you could use a strategy for each country when dealing with it in your application.
We went the EAV route instead of just a free form text field because we still wanted to expose discrete fields to in the UI and have some front-end validation. But sure, from a data integrity standpoint it’s no better than a text field.
