That could work - except integrating the Ez search so it indexes the additional dbase table too could be tricky.
Ez can be a strange beast at times - its so powerful that it sometimes blasts itself past the normal things in life - like easily uploading a 3 column product list of 5000 items, which like you say could be created in a day with mysql and a few php forms.
Has noone had to deal with this sort of issue previously?