I created the following for our website, serialized php works great, except it loads a little slower as you mentioned in your example as we have 5000 records. With the php serialize method I can add an edit column, interactively, I can interact with the table result. The Mysql table is much faster to load but is there any way I can interact with it dynamically as I do below with the php example ? 

<?php

// Initializing the WordPress engine in a stanalone PHP file
//required include files
require('wp-blog-header.php');
require_once("wp-config.php");
require_once("wp-includes/wp-db.php");

header("HTTP/1.1 200 OK"); // Forcing the 200 OK header as WP can return 404 otherwise

// Preparing a WP_query
$the_query = new WP_Query(
array(
'post_type' => 'product', // We only want pages
'post_count' => 50 // We do not want to limit the post count
// We can define any additional arguments that we need - see Codex for the full list
)
);

$return_array = array(); // Initializing the array that will be used for the table

//var_dump($the_query); exit;

while( $the_query->have_posts() ){

// Fetch the post
$the_query->the_post();

$oem = get_post_meta(get_the_id(), "wccaf_oem_part_number", true);
$location = get_post_meta(get_the_id(), "wccaf_location_code", true);
$brand = get_the_terms( get_the_id(), 'product_tag' );
$brand=$brand[0]->name;
//print_r($brand[0]);exit;
//var_dump($brand); exit;

$product = wc_get_product(get_the_id());
$quantity=$product->get_stock_quantity();

if(has_post_thumbnail(get_the_id())) $image="Y"; else $image="N";

// Filling in the new array entry

//if( empty($location)){

$return_array[] = array(
//'Id' => get_the_id(), // Set the ID
'Title' => get_the_title(), // Set the title
'Description'=> get_the_content(),
'Qty'=>$quantity,
'OEM'=>$oem,
'Brand'=>$brand,
'Location'=>$location,
'Image'=>$image,
'Action' =>'Edit',
);
//}

}

// Now the array is prepared, we just need to serialize and output it
echo serialize( $return_array );

?>

Hi Bogdan, basically the advantage of using the php serialize method to create the table is I can dynamically generate values for the table in my php script. For example I can easily add a custom column called "Actions" to the table. (See screenshot http://codaindustriel.com/screenshot-table.png) . This custom column is used for editing the table record or linking to the table record.  However the php serialize is a little slow to load for a large amount of data. 

If I use the mysql query or wp_query method (which is faster according to your documentation), to create a table can I add a custom column in my php script to the table?