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

On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 3:39 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Meh.  I would not think that that represents effective use of JSON:
> if the rows are all the same, why aren't you exposing that structure
> as regular SQL columns?  IMHO, the value of JSON fields within a SQL
> table is to deal with data that is not so well structured.

I used to think that. That actually isn't what people want from a JSON
type, though. People want a flexible data model, but they still
realize that if within a table/"collection" everything is totally
heterogeneous, it becomes impossible to effectively query. They don't
want to run migrations. Or, maybe they are consuming JSON from a
third-party API, and have no control over the schema, even though it
is really is a schema (already represented as JSON, making jsonb a
compelling representation) -- that's a very common use case. It's much
more compelling to store semi-structured data as JSON. Totally
unstructured data just isn't that interesting.

Don't take my word for it, though. See
http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/data-modeling, for example. There is an
implicit assumption throughout that most documents within a MongoDB
collection have the same keys. The choice to not separately index keys
in the GIN hash opclass is far from arbitrary, even if you don't agree
with it.

> In any case, it was certainly the complaint that insertions might
> fail altogether that made me (and I assume others) want to not have
> jsonb_ops as the default opclass.  Is there a good reason not to
> fix that limitation while we still can?

I have no objection to either changing the default, or having no default.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan