The original design used an array of offsets into the variable-length
portion of a JSONB container. However, such an array is basically
uncompressible by simple compression techniques such as TOAST's LZ
compressor. That's bad enough, but because the offset array is at the
front, it tended to trigger the give-up-after-1KB heuristic in the TOAST
code, so that the entire JSONB object was stored uncompressed; which was
the root cause of bug #11109 from Larry White.
To fix without losing the ability to extract a random array element in O(1)
time, change this scheme so that most of the JEntry array elements hold
lengths rather than offsets. With data that's compressible at all, there
tend to be fewer distinct element lengths, so that there is scope for
compression of the JEntry array. Every N'th entry is still an offset.
To determine the length or offset of any specific element, we might have
to examine up to N preceding JEntrys, but that's still O(1) so far as the
total container size is concerned. Testing shows that this cost is
negligible compared to other costs of accessing a JSONB field, and that
the method does largely fix the incompressible-data problem.
While at it, rearrange the order of elements in a JSONB object so that
it's "all the keys, then all the values" not alternating keys and values.
This doesn't really make much difference right at the moment, but it will
allow providing a fast path for extracting individual object fields from
large JSONB values stored EXTERNAL (ie, uncompressed), analogously to the
existing optimization for substring extraction from large EXTERNAL text
values.
Bump catversion to denote the incompatibility in on-disk format.
We will need to fix pg_upgrade to disallow upgrading jsonb data stored
with 9.4 betas 1 and 2.
Heikki Linnakangas and Tom Lane
The main target of this cleanup is the convertJsonb() function, but I also
touched a lot of other things that I spotted into in the process.
The new convertToJsonb() function uses an output buffer that's resized on
demand, so the code to estimate of the size of JsonbValue is removed.
The on-disk format was not changed, even though I refactored the structs
used to handle it. The term "superheader" is replaced with "container".
The jsonb_exists_any and jsonb_exists_all functions no longer sort the input
array. That was a premature optimization, the idea being that if there are
duplicates in the input array, you only need to check them once. Also,
sorting the array saves some effort in the binary search used to find a key
within an object. But there were drawbacks too: the sorting and
deduplicating obviously isn't free, and in the typical case there are no
duplicates to remove, and the gain in the binary search was minimal. Remove
all that, which makes the code simpler too.
This includes a bug-fix; the total length of the elements in a jsonb array
or object mustn't exceed 2^28. That is now checked.
The new format accepts exactly the same data as the json type. However, it is
stored in a format that does not require reparsing the orgiginal text in order
to process it, making it much more suitable for indexing and other operations.
Insignificant whitespace is discarded, and the order of object keys is not
preserved. Neither are duplicate object keys kept - the later value for a given
key is the only one stored.
The new type has all the functions and operators that the json type has,
with the exception of the json generation functions (to_json, json_agg etc.)
and with identical semantics. In addition, there are operator classes for
hash and btree indexing, and two classes for GIN indexing, that have no
equivalent in the json type.
This feature grew out of previous work by Oleg Bartunov and Teodor Sigaev, which
was intended to provide similar facilities to a nested hstore type, but which
in the end proved to have some significant compatibility issues.
Authors: Oleg Bartunov, Teodor Sigaev, Peter Geoghegan and Andrew Dunstan.
Review: Andres Freund
