On my previous countless Rails apps, I've always put each data field as its own column in the DB, but on the last 2 projects, I've started to create a catch-all column that is a MySQL TEXT that I serialize and treat as a hash for a bunch of general stuff, from arrays, hashes, etc.
This has worked well on the last 2 apps whose requirements were not firm, so there are lots of changes on the fly. So when there is a data field for a model that I know I'm going to want to do a find_by..., order, or some other database operation on, I obviously put it into its own SQL column, but otherwise, I've been lumping everything else into that general serialized hash and setting up methods in the model to get/set them as if they were normal attributes. I'm curious to hear some feedback on this technique, e.g. "that bad programming practice because..." or "it has a performance impact because..." or "hey, me too" --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
