why does wordpress serialize the data in the database?

Question

Ok so im fairly new to wordpress programming and realized all their core data, and plugin data are always serialized. Doesn't this take away from the RELATIONAL aspect of a RDBMS? And it doesn't even save space because the strings are soooo long most of the time, and it's harder to scale/modify the data this way...

I don't understand why they decided to do this, and i haven't found any online references as to why they would do this.

Answer 1

Obviously, since I'm not a developer for Wordpress, I don't know their exact reason.

But perhaps they came to the same conclusion as me:

Sometimes, it's just not worth it. Sometimes, you just want to store some data. Sometimes, the database will never, ever do anything with that data other than send it back to the processing code. In cases like this, when the data will never relate to anything else in the database, why bother designing a relational database when a data-dump is all you need?

Is it a good idea? Probably not, it's a lazy one that just works when you need it to with a minimum of fuss. However, if I ever catch you using MySQL to try and process data out of a serialised column, I will ban you from the internet.