Using JSON Column instead of YAML encoded object column

[westonganger]

If you want to use a JSON column instead of YAML encoded solution.

active_record-import and MySQL were not playing nice with JSON columns so I switch to a YAML encoded solution. It should be relatively straight forward to switch to json instead of the text column.The following patch should work for this case.

if SnapshotItem.connection.adapter_name == "Mysql2" && SnapshotItem.columns_hash["object"].type.start_with?("json")
  snapshot_items.each do |attrs|
    SnapshotItem.create!(attrs)
  end
else
  SnapshotItem.import(snapshot_items, validate: true)
end

[westonganger]

One reason to switch to JSON columns would be that we could remove the user_id and user_type columns from snapshots table as all info could be stored in metadata column. For custom solutions even the identifier column could be removed and stored in metadata column too.

[westonganger]

See issue on pay gem where they discuss JSON problems with MySQL/MariaDB

https://github.com/pay-rails/pay/issues/425

Maybe the solution there can be used to mitigate whatever issues were occuring

[westonganger]

This is now supported see the readme, https://github.com/westonganger/active_snapshot#using-a-different-storage-format