Great question; I'm an engineer at Heap. This data model fit our needs at the time, however, you're absolutely right that these user rows do become quite cumbersome as they grow large.
> Well... generally this is solved via indices. An event log indexed by user ID would have the same effect. You get all the user info, and if you really need to grab historical or event data, it's there when necessary for parts of the app that actually need it.
> Well... generally this is solved via indices. An event log indexed by user ID would have the same effect. You get all the user info, and if you really need to grab historical or event data, it's there when necessary for parts of the app that actually need it.
Indeed! We're investigating a more traditional schema, as the topics of our more recent blog posts might suggest (http://blog.heapanalytics.com/speeding-up-postgresql-queries...).