[blowski]

I was working on a massive CRUD project - hundreds of end-user customisable textarea fields. Despite this sounding like a project perfect for a NoSQL database, the in-house team that would be maintaining it were MySQL experts, and didn't want to support MongoDB or anything like that.

So, yep, we stored everything as serialized objects in the database. We had a separate table for 'change events', and whenever someone changed the contents of one of the textareas we stored it in that table. A worker would eventually update the the serialized object, but in the meantime, we would load the serialized object and apply all of the changes that had happened since it was last updated. Basically, an Event Sourcing pattern.

So it was either that, or the EAV route, or the 'end user altering the database' route. The latter two options sounded even worse. Our solution worked out pretty well. Admittedly, it only had a few hundred concurrent users, and even the biggest document was never more than 100K.

So, it can work, but YMMV.