Re: How hard would a "path" operator be to implement in PostgreSQL

On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 2:56 AM, Craig Ringer <ringerc(at)ringerc(dot)id(dot)au> wrote:
> On 08/21/2012 03:01 PM, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
>>
>> Well, Postgres in principle supports arrays of records, so I've
>> wondered if a relationship join could stuff all the objects in a single
>> field of the response using an aggregate. I think what's always
>> prevented this from working is that client would have to parse the
>> resulting output text output, which is practically impossible in the
>> face of custom types.
>
>
> That's where the new JSON support is interesting; it provides a much more
> commonly understood and easier to parse structured form for results, so
> trees (but not more general graphs) can be returned.

I'd go beyond 'interesting' and call it a complete game changer if you
are consuming data in a language that has good support for JSON
(especially javascript naturally). Another good option if you're
consuming structured data in C is libpqtypes.

merlin