Entry with many fields vs plugin/custom data structure

Question

i'm just getting my feet wet with craft and would appreciate some pointers.

Basically, what i would like to do is show and compare products. Each product will have a description, price, review, and many other characteristics (>50 in total). Items must be searchable by any single or combination of these. Data will be imported through a script (ie not manually). Apart from that there will be articles etc (with maybe 3-6 fields) on the site.

Looking at the craft content table, it looks like an extra column is created for each field. When there are different types of entries, often many/most columns will be null.

My question is: should i be concerned about: a) the db structure of craft entries (alternative could be to create separate table for products), especially performance wise

b) searchability of product entries. Would it be easy to search entries by combination of fields?

Not looking for a complete solution, just some pointers i can take along when deciding which way to go :)

Answer 1

Since the data will be imported programmatically, my vote would be to write a plugin that manages these products as a custom thing. There will definitely be a performance benefit to giving your products their own DB table that’s perfectly suited for them, and it doesn’t sound like you’ll be missing any of the features you’d get by having these be actual entries.