Designing For Large WordPress Database

[Kaustubh Katdare]

Hello!

I'm designing a plugin that register custom post type with WordPress system and adds about 30-50 custom fields to each of the custom post. Now, WordPress creates several rows for every entry and my system is expected to see tens of thousands of entries; resulting into 30-50 times the rows.

I thought a better approach would be to encode all my custom fields data into JSON format and store it in just one row per entry. That is, my table now looks like

[ID] [Big JSON string]

My question is this:

I want to make this data searchable. Will it be more efficient to -

1. Search for specific information inside the jSON encoded string in the table.
2. Search for information across multiple rows.

I hope I explained my question right. Thank you for reading and I look forward to receiving responses from you.