[ams6110]

it's always preferable to store a json encoded representation

That's just the format du jour. Ten years ago it would have been "store an XML encoded representation" and ten years before that it would have been some delimited representation. Tomorrow it may be yaml or something even more hideous.

Blobs in the DB can make sense in some situations but they should really be blobs: images, or other binary/raw data. But beyond a certain size it's almost always easier to manage things like these in a filesystem and just store a pointer (filename) in the DB.

[vbezhenar]

I don't agree that it's easier to store them in filesystem. You'll have to deal with a lot of potential problems: consistency, backup, transactions, replication, corruption. Database solves those problems automatically and as long as you can store everything there, you better do that. Good databases are not that bad at storing blobs.

[mattnewton]

But there are database tools emerging to deal with JSON, like Postgres (and Mongodb.) I haven't used Mongo in production, but postgres's json support is fantastic and materially better than anything I have seen with XML. Sometimes you really do need to store nearly schemaless data and operate on it for some time.

[cakes]

As reference there are/were tools in something like MSSQL for dealing with XML.

[mgkimsal]

mysql has had xml/xpath query functions for a while too, iirc.

[orf]

> That's just the format du jour. Ten years ago it would have been "store an XML encoded representation" and ten years before that it would have been some delimited representation.

That's called progress. We can't store it in some future language, who wants to store it as XML, so let's use the best of what we have.

[collyw]

JSON is receiving pretty much the same hype that XML did 15 years ago. I never got really understood the hype about it then and I don't get it with JSON now. I find XML better for some things and JSON better for others. Neither is perfect.

[cyphar]

Never use filenames in a database. There's a bottomless well of security vulnerabilities that spring forth when you decide to "just store a path to the asset".

[unlinker]

Of course, you don't take for granted what the client says. You generate your own file name.