Drupal 8 Module Development

Field storage

We earlier saw how configuration entities are persisted and exported based on the configuration schema and plugin definition. Let's quickly talk about how the fields used on content entities are stored in the database.

Base fields, by default, end up in the entity base table (the one defined in the plugin annotation as base_table). This makes things more performant than having them in individual tables. However, there are some exceptions to this.

If the entity type is translatable, a "data" table gets created where records of the same entity base field values in different languages can be stored. This is the table the Node entity type plugin annotation declared with the property data_table. If this property is missing, the table ...