Re: Proposal: Add JSON support - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Robert Haas
Subject Re: Proposal: Add JSON support
Date
Msg-id r2v603c8f071004061028ie8515647m19a78dabb544c378@mail.gmail.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Proposal: Add JSON support  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Responses Re: Proposal: Add JSON support  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-hackers
On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 12:03 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Petr Jelinek <pjmodos@pjmodos.net> writes:
>> Dne 6.4.2010 7:57, Joseph Adams napsal(a):
>>> To me, the most logical approach is to do the obvious thing: make
>>> JSON's 'null' be SQL's NULL.  For instance, SELECTing on a table with
>>> NULLs in it and converting the result set to JSON would yield a
>>> structure with 'null's in it.  'null'::JSON would yield NULL.  I'm not
>>> sure what startling results would come of this approach, but I'm
>>> guessing this would be most intuitive and useful.
>
>> +1
>
> I think it's a pretty bad idea for 'null'::JSON to yield NULL.  AFAIR
> there is no other standard datatype for which the input converter can
> yield NULL from a non-null input string, and I'm not even sure that the
> InputFunctionCall protocol allows it.  (In fact a quick look indicates
> that it doesn't...)

Oh.  I missed this aspect of the proposal.  I agree - that's a bad idea.

> To me, what this throws into question is not so much whether JSON null
> should equate to SQL NULL (it should), but whether it's sane to accept
> atomic values.

With this, I disagree.  I see no reason to suppose that a JSON NULL
and an SQL NULL are the same thing.

> If I understood the beginning of this discussion, that's
> not strictly legal.  I think it would be better for strict input mode
> to reject this, and permissive mode to convert it to a non-atomic value.
> Thus jsonify('null') wouldn't yield NULL but a structure containing a
> null.

There's no obvious "structure" to convert this into.

...Robert


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