Tagging fields in json as different types is actually something we've talked about (as you may well know given they you're my coworker). But there's another asp

Tagging fields in json as different types is actually something we've talked about (as you may well know given they you're my coworker). But there's another aspect of it that I think is worth mentioning. Right now RethinkDB has a very limited number of types that it can return, it's limited to JSON types so basically just object, array, strings and numbers. There are several other types that could be encode as these but you're going to wind up needing to do conversions when you insert and extract this values from the database. For example you might wind encoding and RGB value as an array of 3 numbers and your code will wind up looking like: table.insert({"color" : colorToArray(c)}).run() arrayToColor(table.get(...).run()["color"]) This obviously is cumbersome. This is the type of problem that an ORM seeks to solve. However ORMs have the big flaw of being limited to a single language and needing to be kept in sync with the database. If you did this in the database layer by having the driver convert the color object to a tagged array then it would know to return it as a color object rather than an array. Other languages could do it too using the same database since they would see the tag and could convert it to a color type in their language.