Re: jsonb and nested hstore

On Feb 28, 2014, at 6:27 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> Taken individually, none of those decisions seem crazy, but taken
> together it's pretty weird. Instead of inventing a new type (jsonb)
> designed from the ground up to do what we want, we're, well, we're
> doing what Christophe says: creating our own proprietary hierarchical
> type and then making the hierarchical type everyone else uses depend
> on it. Described in those terms, it's hard for me to believe that
> anyone here thinks that's not a strange thing to do.

A lot of it is that we're getting really tied up in knots about terminology. Because of the history of the project, it's being approached as "jsonb depends on hstore2", rather than, "We need a binary format, BSON won't cut it, but hstore2 is creating one, so let's use the same for both to avoid duplication of effort."

Put that last way, it's a more sensible decision. My specific concern was "Well, if you want binary json, install hstore" is a very strange presentation to give to customers. Many of the user-facing objections can be solved just by removing the implicit cast from jsonb to hstore, and the remaining operators (if they don't make it into this patch) can be added over time.

--
-- Christophe Pettus
xof(at)thebuild(dot)com