title: Django & postgres - drawbacks of storing data as json in model fields
body: <p>I'm sometimes using a <code>TextField</code> to store data with a structure that may change often (or very complex data) into model instances, instead of modelling everything with the relational paradigm.</p>
  
  <p>I could mostly achieve the same kind of things using more models, foreignkeys and such, but it sometimes feels more straightforward to store JSON directly.</p>
  
  <p>I still didn't delve into postgres JSON type (can be good for read-queries notably, if I understand well). And for the moment I perform some <code>json.dumps</code> and <code>json.loads</code> each time I want to access this kind of data.</p>
  
  <p>I would like to know what are (theoretically) the performance and caching drawbacks of doing so (using JSON type and not), compared to using models for everything.</p>
  
  <p>Having more knowledge about that could help me to later perform some clever comparison and profiling to enhance the overall performance.</p>