What I did: 1) Use the latest Postgres (9.3) 2) use Rails4 - this provides String/Integer Arrays, HStore, UUIDs out of the box 3) use post_json (https://github.

What I did: 1) Use the latest Postgres (9.3) 2) use Rails4 - this provides String/Integer Arrays, HStore, UUIDs out of the box 3) use post_json (https://github.com/webnuts/post_json https://github.com/webnuts/post_json). These tools made it simpler to do things like tagging, user-defined data attributes, hierarchical data, flexible configuration data. It was always possible to store much of this data using text fields and JSON.parse (or some such), but the new Postgres stuff makes the flexible datatypes queryable. And as built-in support for flexible data types comes online, you can throw away your custom serializers. There's other Postgres datatypes that I haven't used - for geocoding/geosearching, network addresses, etc.