Optimize Database Contents

[ehennenfent]

We pickle a lot of JSON objects and write their full contents into the database. This is less-than-ideal, since we can't use those columns for queries, and it wastes space. We should break these items apart into columns and store those columns directly in the database whenever possible.

[ehennenfent]

Per pag's suggestion, we can instead switch the BLOB columns over to JSON columns, so we don't have to clutter up the database with a bunch of useless columns either. http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/core/type_basics.html#sqlalchemy.types.JSON

[ehennenfent]

Ugh, SQLAlchemy has support for it, but only in the development version. We'll icebox this until it's released.