Violating 1st normal form, is it okay for my purpose?

Posted by Nick on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Nick
Published on 2011-01-01T01:19:40Z Indexed on 2011/01/01 1:54 UTC
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database

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arrays

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serialization

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normalization

So I'm making a running log, and I have the workouts stored as entries in a table. For each workout, the user can add intervals (which consist of a time and a distance), so I have an array like this:

[workout] =>
    [description] =>
    [comments] =>
    ...
    [intervals] =>
        [0] =>
            [distance] => 200m
            [time] => 32
        [1] =>
            [distance] => 400m
            [time] => 65
        ...

I'm really tempted to throw the "intervals" array into serialize() or json_encode() and put it in an "intervals" field in my table, however this violates the principles of good database design (which, incidentally, I know hardly anything about).

Is there any disadvantage to doing this? I never plan on querying my table based on the contents of "intervals". Creating a separate table just for intervals seems like a lot of unnecessary complexity, so if anyone with more experience has had a situation like this, what route did you take and how did it work out?

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