If you’re just getting started, I would just send the whole model back to the server on update requests and call it good. The size of the payload is almost guaranteed to be trivial relative to the overhead of the request itself, and it’s the standard behavior you’d expect from an UPDATE request in a REST API. What you’re referring to is called PATCHing, and there doesn’t appear to be a good, tested, canonical answer for this in Ember Data yet (I’d love to be wrong if anyone knows otherwise). That said, it’s on the radar and people are working on solutions. You might want to track this discussion.