为什么我不能将电子邮件正文存储在关系数据库中？

Question

Say I define a table users with a column for email messages where I dump the whole message as a string.

It would be ugly and messy but would it work? What would be the consequence of doing this?

I am asking because I read that unstructured data cannot be stored in a relational database and an email body is highly unstructured but it in itself is just a string.

Answer 1

Yes, you can put the whole email into a "text" or "string" column in the database.

Even better, many databases support text search functionality. So you could build a text index and be able to search through the email body efficiently.

The downside is that the rows are bigger, which can slow down using the table. If the emails are repeated, then you probably want a separate table for the emails, with an id representing the text. Another table would show which users received which email.