Seperate Object over multiple models or encode in JSON?

sorry if the question sounds so weird, but I don' really know how else to put it. Essentially, my application will a bunch of objects. Each objects has somekind of post/comment structure, the unique thing though is, that it is more or less static, so i figure out it would make no sense to put in every single post and comment into my dat开发者_StackOverflowabase, because that would cause more database load? Instead of this, I was thinking about putting the JSON representation of the post with its comments, thus only causing one database access per object. I would then render the JSON object in the controller or view or something. Is this a valid solution?

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No!

You loose all ability to query that data at no benefit unless you are at massive scale. The database's job is to pull that stuff out for you efficiently, and if you create the proper indexes and implement the proper caching strategies, you shouldn't have any issues with database load. You want to replace all the goodness of the Rails ORM with your own decidedly less useful version in the interest of a speed gain, waaay before you need it.

What if later you want to do a most popular comments sidebar widget? Or you want to page through the comments, regardless of the post they are associated with, in a table for moderation? What if you want your data to be searchable?

Don't sacrifice your ability to easily query and manipulate the data for premature optimization.

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Though it sounds a good idea but I don't think that it will work in the long run thinking of what is going to happen when you have many comments on your posts. You will have to get the long string from the database and then add the new comment to it and then update it in the data. This will be very inefficient compared to just inserting one more comment in the table.

Also, just think what is going to happen, if at some point, you will have to give user the option to update the comment. Getting the particular comment from that long string and then update it will be a nightmare, don't you think?

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In general you want to use JSON and the like as a bit of a last resort. Storing JSON in the db makes sense if your information isn't necessarily known ahead of time. It is not a substitute for proper data modelling and is not a win performance-wise.

To give you an idea where I am looking at using it in a project, in LedgerSMB we want to be able to have consultants track additional information on some db objects. Because we don't know what it will be in advance JSON makes a lot of sense. We don't expect to be searching on the data or support searches on the data but if we did that could be arranged using plv8js.