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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

working with JSONB in Postgres is painful.

It's powerful, I love that it's there, but actually using it is always such a chore.

Genuinely curious, what do you find painful about it? Is it the syntax? Performance? Or does it just encourage bad practices?

I also don't get it - it's super easy to write queries with it. Please elaborate...

stuff like this

SELECT jdoc->'guid', jdoc->'name' FROM api WHERE jdoc @> '{"tags": ["qui"]}';

SELECT jdoc->'guid', jdoc->'name' FROM api WHERE jdoc @? '$.tags[*] ? (@ == "qui")';

which find documents in which the key "tags" contains array element "qui"

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-json.html

I had to ask Claude because I've never worked with Mongo, but apparently the equivalent query for MongoDB is:

    db.api.find(
      { "tags": "qui" },
      { 
        "guid": 1, 
        "name": 1,
        "_id": 0
      }
    )

It's fair to compare alternatives but to be clear I'm not saying postgres JSONB is worse than mongo. I'm not very familiar with mongo either. Im saying it can be tedious is absolute terms. I did not assume this to be universal to document dbs but perhaps it could be. Although your example does seem simpler.

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