Model inheritance approach with Django's ORM

Question

I want to store events in a web application I am fooling around with and I feel quite unsure about the pros and cons of each respective approach - using inheritance extensiv

Answer 1

Flat is better than nested. I don't see that the "deep inheritance" is really buying you anything in this case: I'd go for the flatter model as a simpler, plainer design, with likely better performance characteristics and ease of access.

Answer 2

You might want to try Abstract base models. This implements inheritance without joins, by only creating tables for the derived classes, containing fields from both the parent and the derived model. This would allow you to keep your nested design, without the performance penalty of all those joins.