Re: Duplicate JSON Object Keys

On Mar 13, 2013, at 5:17 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> What I think is tricky here is that there's more than one way to
> conceptualize what the JSON data type really is. Is it a key-value
> store of sorts, or just a way to store text values that meet certain
> minimalist syntactic criteria? I had imagined it as the latter, in
> which case normalization isn't sensible. But if you think of it the
> first way, then normalization is not only sensible, but almost
> obligatory.

That makes a lot of sense. Given the restrictions I tend to prefer in my database data types, I had imagined it as the former. And since I'm using it now to store key/value pairs (killing off some awful EAV implementations in the process, BTW), I certainly think of it more formally as an object.

But I can live with the other interpretation, as long as the differences are clearly understood and documented. Perhaps a note could be added to the docs explaining this difference, and what one can do to adapt for it. A normalizing function would certainly help.

Best,

David