How can I deserialize JSON {name, value} in C#?

Database Design: What is the best way to store user config in a database?

• OPTION1: Key/Value Pair USER_SETTINGS -Id -Code (example "Email_LimitMax") -Value (example "5") -UserId ---------------------------- OPTION2: Store configure in separate tables as required "USER_ALERT_SETTINGS" -Id -UserId -EmailAdded (i.e true) -EmailRemoved -PasswordChanged ... ... "USER_EMAIL_SETTINGS" -Id -UserId -EmailLimitMax .... ---------------------------- OPTION3: Store in a XML or JSON text in the user table "USER" -Name ... -ConfigXML

• Answer:

  As usually, it depends :-)  It depends what you want to do with your data. I would say your option 1 is the one you should try to avoid the most, it is actually an anti-pattern (Entity-Attribute-Value anti-pattern) and it has many issues: You cannot easily make attributes mandatory You cannot enforce Data Types (the Value column must be string) or referential integrity Its hard to query everything as a "row" etc. Option 2 is actually an acceptable solution to the Option 1 EAV antipattern and is called Concrete Table Inheritance, however this comes with its own set of challenges, probably the most problematic in this case the fact that you probably want to (somewhere) show and therefore query all the users' settings, that's a lot of (outer!) joins, and what if you need to add a new setting?  New table, update all those queries etc.  This is a good alternative if you do not need to query all settings (which I am presuming you want to do) Option 3 is also acceptable and is called Serialized LOB.  It is useful if you do not have a finite limit of Settings and want to be able to define new ones at any time.  However, the problem is that you cannot easily query such a structure, it has very limited SQL support so you will need to write code that supports this. So pick your poison :-)