Re: jsonb and nested hstore

On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 11:12 AM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> I think Robert and Christophe are right: we're building a Berkeley BART
> Curve. I think there's two courses of action from here which make sense:
>
> A) We move *all* of the important HStore libraries and operators into
> core, and make the hstore extension of them just a mapping of what are
> essentially jsonb operators to the hstore type (Christophe's suggestion).
>
> B) We make hstore/jsonb a single extension with two types and all of the
> requisite operators etc. (Peter's suggestion).

I agree with that dichotomy. I pointed this out a couple of times
already. I think the only reasonable way to deal with the casting
problems are to have parallel sets of operators and functions for
each, and to do that you really need one of those two things.

> Reasons against (B):
>
> * This requires larger changes to the existing patch, which likely means
> missing the bus for 9.4 (and you've seen my blog about that)

This seems very dubious. I highly doubt it. A big part of the reason
why I favor (B) is because I think just the opposite. Tom's remarks
just now are consistent with that.

> My cause, as everyone knows, is adoption. Given that, I'm pretty
> strongly in favor of proposal (A); I think a jsonb type which "just
> works" will drive twice the adoption that one you have to remember to
> install does.

I don't think that's true. I used to work as a consultant, and I had a
number of fairly conservative clients. I don't ever recall there being
a restriction on installing a contrib package. If indeed any DBA does
operate under such a restrictive regime, then that's probably not the
kind of user that this feature is for anyway.

--
Peter Geoghegan