Re: Proposal to use JSON for Postgres Parser format

On Mon, Sep 19, 2022 at 7:29 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Maybe a compromise could be found whereby we provide a conversion
> function that converts whatever the catalog storage format is to
> some JSON equivalent. That would address the needs of external
> code that doesn't want to write a custom parser, while not tying
> us directly to JSON.

That seems like a perfectly good solution, as long as it can be done
in a way that doesn't leave consumers of the JSON output at any kind
of disadvantage.

I find the current node tree format ludicrously verbose, and generally
hard to work with. But it's not the format itself, really -- that's
not the problem. The underlying data structures are typically very
information dense. So having an output format that's a known quantity
sounds very valuable to me.

Writing declarative @> containment queries against (say) a JSON
variant of node tree format seems like it could be a huge quality of
life improvement. It will make the output format even more verbose,
but that might not matter in the same way as it does right now.

--
Peter Geoghegan