Hi Victoria
thanks a lot for providing such an open description of your current situation and what you try to achieve.
I find that very interesting to hear and think it would be awesome, if you'd come back and write (blog) about your experiences, design decisions, issues faced/solved etc.
When it comes to the advise part, it gets tricky, since I don't really know enough of the context here.
The MS Access "hint" was actually not meant to be taken too seriously. I consider Access and Excel to be the epitome of shadow-it and would't really consider using them for anything but UI.
What I like to clearly dis-encourage is the approach of trying to be overly "dynamic" with your coding.
"Dynamic" SQL, "flexibel schemas" and entity-value data storage are sure fire ways to make your application hard to maintain, difficult to debug and they prevent the vast majority of DB-optimization techniques to be effective.
Have a look at how decision tables work - SAP HANA generates the actual runtime objects here instead of some clever dynamic coding. That's what I would recommend to consider for your project, too. Generate the explicit objects (tables, views, procedures, etc. ) instead of creating dynamic coding.
- Lars