I'm not - I'm using the approach here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33888 . That gives me much more flexibility in picking out individual comments from a thread, returning all comments by a specific user, getting all comments posted today, etc. I'm just recognizing this as another possible way to solve the problem, if you don't care about the extra functionality..

As for storing the pickled output:

  dbh.execute('UPDATE articles SET comments = $comments WHERE news_id = $id', 
              comments=pickle.dumps(article.comments))

The comments field can be a normal TEXT field, since the default format for pickle is ASCII-based.

Okay, makes sense. I hadn't read your earlier posting that carefully before, but it sounds better than what I had in mind.