David Goodwin has a suggestion for those developers that think storing objects in a database is a good idea - don't do it!

Short answer: DO NOT DO IT. Longer answer:....I hate seeing serialized PHP objects within a database.

Some of his reasons include:

• It's difficult to index/search - you'll probably need to use a regexp.
• PHP Specific - good luck doing much with the data in a.n.other language
• If the objects are large, you're likely to have a text or a blob field - this will suck from a performance point of view (at least in MySQL)
• Why bother storing serialized objects in a database - surely to the filesystem would be better?

Several opinions are expressed in the comments including some that agree with David and some that still defend the idea.