Re: jsonb subscripting vs SQL/JSON array accessor semantics (SQL:2023)

On Sat, 17 Jan 2026 at 11:22, Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com> wrote:
> Described handling of corner cases in SQL/JSON has some logic and consistency, but it is not compatible with the
genericphilosophy of PostgreSQL arrays. If I know ANSI/SQL doesn't know arrays, so this inconsistency is just a
PostgreSQLproblem, and because we don't like feature flags, I don't see any solution to how this situation can be
solved.

Array subscripting (aka indexing) and jsonb subscripting work
completely differently. A very important difference is that arrays use
1-based subscripting, while jsonb uses 0-based subscripting.

> Any solution will be ugly. In  this situation I prefer current behavior - (inconsistency between array access and
JSON_QUERY)with good description in documentation. 
>
> Theoretically it can be introduced lax_postgres like you propose. But I don't see how it can help with possible
compatibilityissues when somebody will migrate from other databases. 

I didn't mean to suggest it for compatibility reasons (although I do
think there's very little practical compatibility risk with keeping
our current behaviour). It seemed mostly nice so that we can have a
simplified accessor parsetree be transformed to the same plan as json
query based query. That will make explain plans look the same/similar
and it also means that expression indexes can be easily used with both
syntaxes.

> So anything inside JSON_XXXX functions can be rigidly consistent with standard SQL/JSON. Outside should not be true -
andit is better to say it explicitly. I don't think introducing some JavaScripts concepts to Postgres (although just
forsome corner cases) is a good idea (when we have some specific handling of some corner cases too). 

What does Javascript have to do with this topic?