Discriminated union data models?
ORMHey there. I'm here to ask a data structures question that I've been struggling with. In my application, I would like to have have
But each kind can have several variants. For example, a
Conceptually,
If we designed this using objects in TypeScript, we'd end up with a nested discriminated union:
However, we can't do this exactly in SQL. We can technically accomplish this in a relational database by relating post to each kind, and kind kind to each variant. But we still get no type safety, and when we fetch a feed of posts, we don't know in advance what kind or variant we have, so we can't conditionally include associated models.
So, how would you approach this problem? Would you flatten the data structure into
poststextaudiovideoBut each kind can have several variants. For example, a
textnotewritingjournalConceptually,
postkindvariantIf we designed this using objects in TypeScript, we'd end up with a nested discriminated union:
However, we can't do this exactly in SQL. We can technically accomplish this in a relational database by relating post to each kind, and kind kind to each variant. But we still get no type safety, and when we fetch a feed of posts, we don't know in advance what kind or variant we have, so we can't conditionally include associated models.
So, how would you approach this problem? Would you flatten the data structure into
postkind