2009/5/23 Stefan Keller
<sfkeller@gmail.com>I have a use case where the I want to put an unforeseable number of key/value pairs in a column.
Now, PostgreSQL has arrays as first class types.
Are there any best practices and snippets (preferrably in plpgsql) for handling key/value pairs?
-- S.
common relational practice is to use entity-attribute-value model to attach any number of key/value pairs to any object, for example:
object( object_id, ... )
attribute ( attr_id, attr_name )
object_attribute ( object_id, attr_id, attr_value )
if your a lazy DBA and text key/values are all you need, did you look at hstore? it might be enough.
my personal hstore experience is:
1) keep your key/values reasonably small; if you need structured data - do not put it into hstore.
2) keep in mind that hstore indexing is limited, many search operations require full table scan
--
Filip Rembiałkowski
JID,mailto:
filip.rembialkowski@gmail.comhttp://filip.rembialkowski.net/