On Mar 13, 2013, at 5:17 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> What I think is tricky here is that there's more than one way to
> conceptualize what the JSON data type really is. Is it a key-value
> store of sorts, or just a way to store text values that meet certain
> minimalist syntactic criteria? I had imagined it as the latter, in
> which case normalization isn't sensible. But if you think of it the
> first way, then normalization is not only sensible, but almost
> obligatory.
That makes a lot of sense. Given the restrictions I tend to prefer in my database data types, I had imagined it as the
former.And since I'm using it now to store key/value pairs (killing off some awful EAV implementations in the process,
BTW),I certainly think of it more formally as an object.
But I can live with the other interpretation, as long as the differences are clearly understood and documented. Perhaps
anote could be added to the docs explaining this difference, and what one can do to adapt for it. A normalizing
functionwould certainly help.
Best,
David