High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails

Maintaining Unstructured JSON Data

In the last section, you created unstructured data as JSON-formatted text. The flexibility afforded by not having to design your schema upfront meant you could add new types of metrics easily without worrying about their types or values.

While that flexibility is nice when starting, as things solidify over time, the trade-off is unstructured data is more difficult to maintain because it’s unclear what data can go in and what types are associated with keys and values.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could balance both that flexibility and the ability to bring in some of the rigidity we’ve seen earlier with constraints to help describe and enforce good data in unstructured storage?

Staying Organized with Unstructured ...