Re: jsonb and nested hstore

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> And despite the assertions from various people here that these
> decisions were all made a long time ago and it's way too late to
> question them, I don't buy it. There's not a single email on this
> mailing list clearly laying out the design that we've ended up with,
> and I'm willing to wager any reasonable amount of money that if
> someone had posted an email saying "hey, we're thinking about setting
> things up so that jsonb and hstore have the same binary format, but
> you can't index jsonb directly, you have to cast it to hstore, is
> everyone OK with that?" someone would have written back and said "no,
> that sounds nuts". The reason why input on that particular aspect of
> the design was not forthcoming isn't because everyone was OK with it;
> it's because it was never clearly spelled out.

No, that was never the design (I trust). It's where we are today
because time ran out to complete jsonb for 9.4, and tossing the index
opclasses overboard was one of the last-minute compromises in order
to have something submittable.

I think it would be a completely defensible decision to postpone jsonb
to 9.5 on the grounds that it's not done enough. Now, Josh has laid out
arguments why we want jsonb in 9.4 even if it's incomplete. But ISTM
that those are fundamentally marketing arguments; on a purely technical
basis I think the decision would be to postpone. So it comes down
to how you weight marketing vs technical issues, which is something
that everyone is likely to see a little bit differently :-(

regards, tom lane