Re: Protocol buffer support for Postgres

On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 11:35 AM, Álvaro Hernández Tortosa
<aht(at)8kdata(dot)com> wrote:
>
>
> On 24/06/16 14:23, Flavius Anton wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 2:54 PM, Flavius Anton <f(dot)v(dot)anton(at)gmail(dot)com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 1:50 PM, Greg Stark <stark(at)mit(dot)edu> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 8:15 PM, Flavius Anton <f(dot)v(dot)anton(at)gmail(dot)com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I'd love to talk more about this.
>>>>
>>>> I thought quite a bit about this a few years ago but never really
>>>> picked up it to work on.
>>
>> Any other thoughts on this? My guess is that it might be an important
>> addition to Postgres that can attract even more users, but I am not
>> sure if there's enough interest from the community. If I want to pick
>> this task, how should I move forward? Do I need to write a design
>> document or similar or should I come up with a patch that implements a
>> draft prototype? I am new to this community and don't know the code
>> yet, so I'd appreciate some guidance from an older, more experienced
>> member.
>>
>>
>
> Other than protobuf, there are also other serialization formats that
> might be worth considering. Not too long ago I suggested working
> specifically on serialization formas for the json/jsonb types:
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/56CB8A62.40100%408kdata.com I believe
> this effort is on the same boat.

Sure, there are a bunch of these, some of the most popular being:
* Cap'n Proto
* Flatbuffers
* Thrift

A longer list is already made here[1].

Meanwhile, I came across another interesting idea. What if, for
starters, we don't introduce a completely new serialization format,
like Protocol Buffers, but rather make the JSON support more stronger
and interesting. What I am thinking is to have a JSON schema
(optionally) associated with a JSON column. In this way, you don't
have to store the keys on disk anymore and also you'd have your
database check for JSON validity at INSERT time. I think there are two
big advantages here. What do you think about this one?

--
Flavius

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_data_serialization_formats