In reply to Andreas Nurbo.

I disagree. As a developer I find the post table to only be about 10-15% 'dumb'. I regularly utilize the vast majority of fields, especially with custom post types.

There is very little I would change with the WordPress database. I understand some people have concerns, like the gentleman above who mentioned 5000 entries in the posts table could means 500,000 rows in the postmeta table. Running an advanced query on postmeta that is searching multiple 'key' fields with a corresponding value can result in a slow query. But there are ways to mitigate that slow down and turn those slow queries into speed demons.

From a structural standpoint I think it's the best possible system for the different tasks it needs to accomplish. Keep in mind that the real power of WordPress is the versatility. It's definitely possible to layout a "better" database for a specific purpose, but WordPress isn't a single purpose tool. It has to be flexible and cover unknown use cases. Just because you or I don't need a specific field doesn't mean that field isn't vital for someone else.