I don't know much about databases and which way to best do things but in the past 6 months I have been building lots of things in flask and do it's a problem I'm increasingly becoming acquainted with.

I wonder: -is it useful to not have a defined data structure? I would k it makes it slightly more verbose when you are trying to update elements to have to refer to the key value pair rather than just the foot notation style -does this mean that you don't need to redefine a data structure/model if you add additional elements? -apart from what looks looks an elegant syntactical structure for data queries, are there any specific advantages to this approach?

Thanks for your help in increasing my understanding

RethinkDB keeps looking better and better. That aside, I have recently been convinced of the huge advantages of a strict schema on your data. It's just very very useful to know that your data will be a specific type when loaded.

In cases where we didn't enforce that (e.g. allowing nulls when we shouldn't have, or using a JSON blob), it came back to bite us in the ass.

Nice, I have been holding off on using rethinkdb for my web apps until there was a nice odm, i'll certainly give it a look although I must admit that postgres has been pretty great for us.