Re: jsonb and nested hstore

On 02/27/2014 01:28 PM, Merlin Moncure wrote:
> How we got here is not the point. All that matters is what's going to
> happen from here. Here are the facts as I see them:

Well, it certainly matters if we want it in this release.

As far as I can tell, moving jsonb to contrib basically requires
rewriting a bunch of code, without actually fixing any of the bugs which
have been discussed in the more technical reviews. I'm really unclear
what, at this point, moving jsonb to /contrib would improve.

On 02/27/2014 04:27 PM, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> I think that a typed, nested hstore has considerable independent
> value, and would have had just the same value 10 years ago, before
> JSON existed. I'm told that broadly speaking most people would prefer
> the interface to speak JSON, and I'd like to give people what they
> want, but that's as far as it goes. While I see problems with some
> aspects of the patches as implemented, I think that the reason that
> the two types share a binary format is that they're basically the same
> thing. It might be that certain facets of the nested hstore
> implementation reflect a need to accommodate jsonb, but there are no
> ones that I'm currently aware of that I find at all objectionable.

We discussed this with Oleg & Teodor at pgCon 2013. From the
perspective of several of us, we were mystified as to why hstore2 has
it's own syntax at all; that is, why not just implement the JSONish
syntax? Their answer was to provide a smooth upgrade path to existing
hstore users, which makes sense. This was also the reason for not
making hstore a core type.

But again ... we discussed all of this at pgCon and in
November-December. It's not like the people on this thread now weren't
around for both of those discussions.

And it's not just that "broadly speaking most people would prefer
the interface to speak JSON"; it's that a JSONish interface for indexed
heirachical data is a Big Feature which will drive adoption among web
developers, and hstore2 without JSON support simply is not. At trade
shows and developer conferences, I get more questions about PostgreSQL's
JSON support than I do for any new feature since streaming replication.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com