Add List<Metadata> to Organization model

[miguel-merlin]

Description

There is a one-to-many relationship between Organization and Metadata. We have two approaches to model this relationship.

Linked (Denormalized) Data

{
"id": "",
"name": "",
"alternate_name": "",
...,
"metadata": [
{
"id": "1",
"metadata-attribute": "",
},
{
"id": "2",
"metadata-attribute": "",
}
]
}

In essence, all the metadata objects are stored inside the metadata attribute of the Organization object. This is mainly used when we are trying to model one-to-one (not the case) relationships or one-to-few (I think this is the case).

Linked (Normalized) Data

Organizations collection

{
"id": "",
"name": "",
"alternate_name": "",
...,
"metadata": [1, 2]
}

Metadata collection

{
"id": "1",
"attribute": "",
...
},
{
"id": "2",
"attribute": "",
...
}

At least for the metadata attribute I would suggest going with Linked Denormalized relationships.

[ZhangTerrence]

When I wrote the models, I did not include the foreign key attributes as they were inherently defined in a denormalized environment. For example, the metadata collection should have a resource_id attribute. However, should I include them just to match the HSDS schema reference and enable two-way references?

[miguel-merlin]

Not necessarily for all attributes. Having a denormalized data and normalized really depends on the writes/reads done to the attribute. Denormalized data works for attributes that are read often, but not changed often. It models one-to-one and one-to-few. At least for the metadata which Im assuming is not written often, it would make sense that we store it inside the organization object.

[ZhangTerrence]

I see, that does make sense since this database is mostly OLAP. But should I just include the resource_id attribute just so the data is there?