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by jjice 1744 days ago
To add to/reiterate the above, they use a separate table to store metadata. Whenever you see a situation in a webservice where there is a custom way to store data, it's likely that they either store metadata in a table, store is as a more lose format like JSON or XML, or a combination of both.

In my experience, most services don't make tables on the fly that are meant to hang around, since storing metadata can get you very far.