For certain abstractions, we are looking to maintain the state of a business process over time:
The relational concern is the storage of metadata sufficient to locate & retrieve the state. E.g.: integer primary key, name of process, current transition in process, some datetime info, active session id, last user, etc.
The 'non-relational' portion is simply a final 'Json' column per row that contains the actual serialized state. This state model can vary wildly depending on the particular process in play, so by having it serialized we can get a lot of reuse potential out of our solution.
In terms of the models, it's not 1 gigantic class with 1000 properties. Its more like a set of 100+ related models with 5-30 properties each.
Ah yup, that makes a lot more sense. I can imagine how fun that might be trying to do through EF.
It sounds like a workflow engine. I'm picturing one table that is very generic that tracks "this job id, this workflow type, this stage in workflow, this entity, this state of the entity" and a single job has multiple of those entries over the lifetime of that job execution and the JSON blob is the current state of things, so that you don't have to go and recompute that.
Yeah, it seems like a reasonable choice.
What sticks out to me in a scenario like that is a good CQRS implementation. The write side of it pumps in the history of the job execution, then denormalizers run to project that into a shape amenable to being read by the application.
The relational concern is the storage of metadata sufficient to locate & retrieve the state. E.g.: integer primary key, name of process, current transition in process, some datetime info, active session id, last user, etc.
The 'non-relational' portion is simply a final 'Json' column per row that contains the actual serialized state. This state model can vary wildly depending on the particular process in play, so by having it serialized we can get a lot of reuse potential out of our solution.
In terms of the models, it's not 1 gigantic class with 1000 properties. Its more like a set of 100+ related models with 5-30 properties each.