Hi, I have a best question practice about database design.  My idea is to
store business rules information for my customers.  Basically, I define a set
of rules.  For each rule, I know the type.  Then I want to describe the
customers' sets of rules.

I want a table of CustomerID, RuleID, Value

Example:  
Rule 1 = tax rate (Currency)
Rule 2 = Fiscal Year Start (Date)
Rule 3 = Have website (Boolean)

Then, my table might look like this: (CustomerID, RuleID, Value)

123,1,7.5
123,2,#1/1/5#
123,3,True

Obviously, I can't have a single column in SQL Server 2000 that holds
variant types.  One solution is to have a column for each type and keep Null
values in all of them except the correct type column.  That doesn't seem
right.

One suggestion was to cast the value to Binary, store it as such and then
cast the Binary value back to the expected data type when we need to use it.  
Would that work in all cases?

Any thoughts are appreciated.