I came to the point in my application development, that I need to start caching profiles. I guess that many of you already doing such caching and can share some tips from your experience.
Basically what I thought about is to store the cached profiles in a DB table. What I wasn't sure about is the schema of the table. Thought of two options: 1. store the user_id, screenname and created_at/updated_at fields (to know where to get newer copy) and to store the rest of the fields as JSON in a blob/text field. Pros: no need to update structure whenever the API updates. Cons: can't do interesting aggregations on the profiles. 2. create the table schema to be same as the fields the Twitter API returns (+ created_at/updated_at). Pros: can do interesting aggregations, can set indexes on key fields (although I will usually retrieve by user_id/screename) Cons: will have to update the schema each time the API updates, need to create a lot of fields in the DB :) Any other cons/pros I need to consider? Any other suggestions? Thanks ! Arik (@arikfr)
