They are generally good for blob like information that is generally retrieved in a query with some structure around name->value pairs. You mentioned (forum) that there isn't an index on these items so you'll get more row scanning on these if people search on a Dynamic attribute tokens (not sure why you are adding "token" to the language here). This limitation to be mentioned more in the documentation you've written. You could use computed columns to extract a variable to index if really needed but you'll need to ask why isn't it a column in its own right. https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/virtual-computed-columns/ Enhancing frameworks to expose database features is a good thing as they often get omitted in the reduction to the lowest common factor (mysql-5.0?) and sometimes the lowest common factor across db implementations (ansi SQL(?)). -- -- Daniel Black, Engineer @ Open Query (http://openquery.com.au) Remote expertise & maintenance for MySQL/MariaDB server environments.