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It's a very boring technique really in hindsight. I guess one is really at the top 1% when you work at a high scale company and you see techniques that question the assumptions one holds. Databases like MySQL, as you pointed out, are embracing this technique, but make the inner data indexable.

Also https://www.skeema.io/ looks like a good product that I'll have to checkout. Looks like a better product so far compared to solutions like flyway/liquibase. Full featured suite for DB migration from dev -> prod is exactly what I've been raving about. Like it is "boring" tech as in no one really wants to touch it, but it is the easiest to screw up and products like this really take it to the next level.

The responses I've seen in this post appear to be from people who've never used dynamic fields in a db and advise against it by saying it is an anti pattern. If it is an anti-pattern, bring on all the anti patterns as I'd like to not wake up at night or be pinged for slowness.




Yeah, it's always interesting seeing the contrast between textbook computer science approaches vs practical real-world solutions. For some reason, people get especially hung up about academic CS concepts in the database world in particular... I've found things are never that clean in the real world at scale.

Thank you for the kind words re: Skeema :)




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