Document existence operator adequately; fix obsolete claim that no
Unicode-escape semantic checks happen on input (it's still true for
json, but not for jsonb); improve examples; assorted wordsmithing.
I started out with the intention of just fixing the info about the jsonb
operator classes, but soon found myself copy-editing most of the JSON
material. Hopefully it's more readable now.
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
Tom Lane
Heikki Linnakangas
Andrew Dunstan