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by palmdeezy 3574 days ago
Hey SQL newbie question: why use JSONB when you could split out tables into `user` and `user_meta`? isn't that how Wordpress works?
1 comments

It all depends on what you're doing...

But, we had a situation where we had a "user_meta" equivalent, but wanted to support different data types (and even possibly nested data) using JSONB allowed for simple modelling of something like `{ "age": 1, "school": "blah", "something": { "in": "depth" } }` which isn't as simple using an extra "meta" table.

(Not to say it's the best thing to do (depending on the situation it might be better to have explicit columns for those fields) but it's an example of how it can be more powerful than just having an extra "meta" table.)

Ahhhh so this will be super useful if I want to keep track of transaction events from a third party (like Shopify or Stripe). I could just keep table with `ID` `user_id` `time` `blob`.