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
