Frustrated by Magento? Then you’ll love
Need to know the name of an EAV table that an attribute is stored in? Get an instance of the model class,
$customer = Mage::getModel('customer/customer');
then get a reference to its resource object,
$entity = $customer->getResource();
and use the eav/config service model’s getCollectionAttribute method to create an instance of the attribute object.
$attribute = Mage::getSingleton('eav/config')->getCollectionAttribute($entity->getType(), 'firstname');
With all that in place call the attribute object’s getBackendTable method.
var_dump($attribute->getBackendTable());
My main use for this is when I need to write custom queries for reporting and want to be absolutely sure I’m getting the right table. Of course, I’m also going to need the attribute ID if I want to grab the right row. That’s available via
$attribute->getId()