We've been trying to support \u0000 in JSON values since commit
78ed8e03c6, and have introduced increasingly worse hacks to try to
make it work, such as commit 0ad1a81632. However, it fundamentally
can't work in the way envisioned, because the stored representation looks
the same as for \\u0000 which is not the same thing at all. It's also
entirely bogus to output \u0000 when de-escaped output is called for.
The right way to do this would be to store an actual 0x00 byte, and then
throw error only if asked to produce de-escaped textual output. However,
getting to that point seems likely to take considerable work and may well
never be practical in the 9.4.x series.
To preserve our options for better behavior while getting rid of the nasty
side-effects of 0ad1a81632, revert that commit in toto and instead
throw error if \u0000 is used in a context where it needs to be de-escaped.
(These are the same contexts where non-ASCII Unicode escapes throw error
if the database encoding isn't UTF8, so this behavior is by no means
without precedent.)
In passing, make both the \u0000 case and the non-ASCII Unicode case report
ERRCODE_UNTRANSLATABLE_CHARACTER / "unsupported Unicode escape sequence"
rather than claiming there's something wrong with the input syntax.
Back-patch to 9.4, where we have to do something because 0ad1a81632
broke things for many cases having nothing to do with \u0000. 9.3 also has
bogus behavior, but only for that specific escape value, so given the lack
of field complaints it seems better to leave 9.3 alone.
Cause the path extraction operators to return their lefthand input,
not NULL, if the path array has no elements. This seems more consistent
since the case ought to correspond to applying the simple extraction
operator (->) zero times.
Cause other corner cases in field/element/path extraction to return NULL
rather than failing. This behavior is arguably more useful than throwing
an error, since it allows an expression index using these operators to be
built even when not all values in the column are suitable for the
extraction being indexed. Moreover, we already had multiple
inconsistencies between the path extraction operators and the simple
extraction operators, as well as inconsistencies between the JSON and
JSONB code paths. Adopt a uniform rule of returning NULL rather than
throwing an error when the JSON input does not have a structure that
permits the request to be satisfied.
Back-patch to 9.4. Update the release notes to list this as a behavior
change since 9.3.
There's no longer much pressure to switch the default GIN opclass for
jsonb, but there was still some unhappiness with the name "jsonb_hash_ops",
since hashing is no longer a distinguishing property of that opclass,
and anyway it seems like a relatively minor detail. At the suggestion of
Heikki Linnakangas, we'll use "jsonb_path_ops" instead; that captures the
important characteristic that each index entry depends on the entire path
from the document root to the indexed value.
Also add a user-facing explanation of the implementation properties of
these two opclasses.
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
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
Peter Eisentraut
Heikki Linnakangas
Andrew Dunstan