[ckan-discuss] Architecture Best Practice

[Sean Hammond]

> deployment. But wouldn't 300 custom fields x X agencies still equal a
> tremendous number of fields in a single table, just conditionally displayed?

That is a lot of fields, yes. I think the speed of it may depend on a
couple of things. First, as Ian says, it depends which methods you use
to store and retrieve those fields. Second, it depends on what
validation and conversion you do when storing those fields. I don't see
any reason why validating 300 fields can't be done very quickly, on the
other hand, I've no doubt it _could_ be very slow, depending on the
validation functions used.

I think storing this many custom fields is somewhat new territory and is
also heavily dependent on just what those fields are, so the upshot is
that you'll have to try it to find out how well it works, and may need
to experiment with different approaches to find one that works well.