Correct. If only storing/retrieving was the goal, a text field would have been more than enough. But we also needed to retrieve data based on their address, a

Correct. If only storing/retrieving was the goal, a text field would have been more than enough. But we also needed to retrieve data based on their address, and to generate reports on a daily basis, which made for being able to do "JSON queries" so much easier. So we put that logic in the application layer instead, something like: User - lookupByAddress(data) GermanUser inherits from User - overrides lookupByAddress(data) ...etc., so that we could be very specific about our queries depending on the country, or even _region_ in some countries.