I agree that a local copy will have to be maintained if the change to create columns in person_attributes is done either in the database or in the code but this is a temporary fix till the column can be created through OpenERP UI. I had also reported that in earlier version (<0.88) person_attributes were stored as name, value pair but now getting stored as columns. I don’t know when this design change happened - please check for details Data sent to OpenERP/oodo