Re: default opclass for jsonb (was Re: Call for GIST/GIN/SP-GIST opclass documentation)

On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 2:52 PM, Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)heroku(dot)com> wrote:
> I've added a wildcard to the rhs jsonb here, which of course won't
> work, the proximate cause being that that simply isn't valid jsonb.
> It's also something inherently impossible to support with the current
> jsonb_hash_op's indexing strategy. That only hashes elements and
> values, mixing in keys from all outer nesting levels (so it's possible
> for there to be 0 *nentries).

It occurs to me that this could be a particular problem for
jsonb_hash_ops. Consider this jsonb:

'{"a":{}}'::jsonb

In one sense, the outermost level's "a" key does have a value: an
empty object. So we may test containment in an indexable fashion like
this:

select * from foo where j @> '{"a":{}}'::jsonb

But in another sense, the sense that is relevant to jsonb_hash_ops, it
does not. There would be *no* GIN keys passed back from
gin_extract_jsonb_hash() if it were tasked with extracting keys from
this rhs jsonb.

Now, I'm not all that worried about this, because this is surely an
odd-ball use case, particularly for jsonb_hash_ops where no keys are
separately indexed (separately from *primitive* elements/values).
However, it is worth noting in the documentation in my view. I attach
a doc patch that adds this.

--
Peter Geoghegan