Most of the time there is too much attention on persisting data instead of focusing on clean code! Just keep everything in a in memory map structure and you will be fine!
Never ask permission to refactor. Never ask permission to write tests. You do these things because you KNOW they are the best way to go fast.
When you ask permission, you are asking someone else to take responsibility for your actions.
According to my calculations, test-code is approximately 2.843 times more important than productive code. Only tests provide spec and validation for business usecases #TestsFirst