if there was a best way...

it would be the only way - why would anyone invent a "not the best way" way ;)

It depends. To me, many times, the best way isn't even listed here. You store them as columns - attributes - of some table.


But, assuming you won't do that (it would make it pretty darn easy to query - and efficient too) - here are some things to consider:

a) XML - you could text index that and use some pretty sophisticated searching on it. Not as good as columns in a table, but it works.

b) EAV (entity attribute value) model - getting all of the attributes for a given device will be very fast and require no parsing

c) EAV - querying this model will be painful.



I'd probably rank them like this:

a) do a proper data model, #1
b) EAV - if I didn't need to query the columns #2, else #3
c) XML - see b, either #3 or #2