JSON is a language-independent data format. It was derived from JavaScript, but many modern programming languages include code to generate and parse JSON-format data. JSON filenames use the extension .json.
JSON Schema specifies a JSON-based format to define the structure of JSON data for validation, documentation, and interaction control. It provides a contract for the JSON data required by a given application, and how that data can be modified.[36] JSON Schema is based on the concepts from XML Schema (XSD) but is JSON-based. As in XSD, the same serialization/deserialization tools can be used both for the schema and data, and it is self-describing. It is specified in an Internet Draft at the IETF, currently in 2020-12 draft, which was released on January 28, 2021.[37] There are several validators available for different programming languages,[38] each with varying levels of conformance. The standard filename extension is .json.[39]
Note: If you are having trouble following the dot/bracket notation we are using to access the JavaScript object, it can help to have the superheroes.json file open in another tab or your text editor, and refer to it as you look at our JavaScript. You should also refer back to our JavaScript object basics article for more information on dot and bracket notation.
\n Note: If you are having trouble following the dot/bracket notation we are using to access the JavaScript object, it can help to have the superheroes.json file open in another tab or your text editor, and refer to it as you look at our JavaScript.\n You should also refer back to our JavaScript object basics article for more information on dot and bracket notation.\n
PostgreSQL offers two types for storing JSON data: json and jsonb. To implement efficient query mechanisms for these data types, PostgreSQL also provides the jsonpath data type described in Section 8.14.7.
The json and jsonb data types accept almost identical sets of values as input. The major practical difference is one of efficiency. The json data type stores an exact copy of the input text, which processing functions must reparse on each execution; while jsonb data is stored in a decomposed binary format that makes it slightly slower to input due to added conversion overhead, but significantly faster to process, since no reparsing is needed. jsonb also supports indexing, which can be a significant advantage.
Because the json type stores an exact copy of the input text, it will preserve semantically-insignificant white space between tokens, as well as the order of keys within JSON objects. Also, if a JSON object within the value contains the same key more than once, all the key/value pairs are kept. (The processing functions consider the last value as the operative one.) By contrast, jsonb does not preserve white space, does not preserve the order of object keys, and does not keep duplicate object keys. If duplicate keys are specified in the input, only the last value is kept.
RFC 7159 permits JSON strings to contain Unicode escape sequences denoted by \uXXXX. In the input function for the json type, Unicode escapes are allowed regardless of the database encoding, and are checked only for syntactic correctness (that is, that four hex digits follow \u). However, the input function for jsonb is stricter: it disallows Unicode escapes for characters that cannot be represented in the database encoding. The jsonb type also rejects \u0000 (because that cannot be represented in PostgreSQL's text type), and it insists that any use of Unicode surrogate pairs to designate characters outside the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane be correct. Valid Unicode escapes are converted to the equivalent single character for storage; this includes folding surrogate pairs into a single character.
Many of the JSON processing functions described in Section 9.16 will convert Unicode escapes to regular characters, and will therefore throw the same types of errors just described even if their input is of type json not jsonb. The fact that the json input function does not make these checks may be considered a historical artifact, although it does allow for simple storage (without processing) of JSON Unicode escapes in a database encoding that does not support the represented characters.
When converting textual JSON input into jsonb, the primitive types described by RFC 7159 are effectively mapped onto native PostgreSQL types, as shown in Table 8.23. Therefore, there are some minor additional constraints on what constitutes valid jsonb data that do not apply to the json type, nor to JSON in the abstract, corresponding to limits on what can be represented by the underlying data type. Notably, jsonb will reject numbers that are outside the range of the PostgreSQL numeric data type, while json will not. Such implementation-defined restrictions are permitted by RFC 7159. However, in practice such problems are far more likely to occur in other implementations, as it is common to represent JSON's number primitive type as IEEE 754 double precision floating point (which RFC 7159 explicitly anticipates and allows for). When using JSON as an interchange format with such systems, the danger of losing numeric precision compared to data originally stored by PostgreSQL should be considered.
As previously stated, when a JSON value is input and then printed without any additional processing, json outputs the same text that was input, while jsonb does not preserve semantically-insignificant details such as whitespace. For example, note the differences here:
One semantically-insignificant detail worth noting is that in jsonb, numbers will be printed according to the behavior of the underlying numeric type. In practice this means that numbers entered with E notation will be printed without it, for example:
Testing containment is an important capability of jsonb. There is no parallel set of facilities for the json type. Containment tests whether one jsonb document has contained within it another one. These examples return true except as noted:
jsonb also has an existence operator, which is a variation on the theme of containment: it tests whether a string (given as a text value) appears as an object key or array element at the top level of the jsonb value. These examples return true except as noted:
The default GIN operator class for jsonb supports queries with the key-exists operators ?, ? and ?&, the containment operator @>, and the jsonpath match operators @? and @@. (For details of the semantics that these operators implement, see Table 9.46.) An example of creating an index with this operator class is:
For these operators, a GIN index extracts clauses of the form accessors_chain = constant out of the jsonpath pattern, and does the index search based on the keys and values mentioned in these clauses. The accessors chain may include .key, [*], and [index] accessors. The jsonb_ops operator class also supports .* and .** accessors, but the jsonb_path_ops operator class does not.
Although the jsonb_path_ops operator class supports only queries with the @>, @? and @@ operators, it has notable performance advantages over the default operator class jsonb_ops. A jsonb_path_ops index is usually much smaller than a jsonb_ops index over the same data, and the specificity of searches is better, particularly when queries contain keys that appear frequently in the data. Therefore search operations typically perform better than with the default operator class.
The technical difference between a jsonb_ops and a jsonb_path_ops GIN index is that the former creates independent index items for each key and value in the data, while the latter creates index items only for each value in the data. [7] Basically, each jsonb_path_ops index item is a hash of the value and the key(s) leading to it; for example to index "foo": "bar": "baz", a single index item would be created incorporating all three of foo, bar, and baz into the hash value. Thus a containment query looking for this structure would result in an extremely specific index search; but there is no way at all to find out whether foo appears as a key. On the other hand, a jsonb_ops index would create three index items representing foo, bar, and baz separately; then to do the containment query, it would look for rows containing all three of these items. While GIN indexes can perform such an AND search fairly efficiently, it will still be less specific and slower than the equivalent jsonb_path_ops search, especially if there are a very large number of rows containing any single one of the three index items.
A disadvantage of the jsonb_path_ops approach is that it produces no index entries for JSON structures not containing any values, such as "a": . If a search for documents containing such a structure is requested, it will require a full-index scan, which is quite slow. jsonb_path_ops is therefore ill-suited for applications that often perform such searches.
jsonb also supports btree and hash indexes. These are usually useful only if it's important to check equality of complete JSON documents. The btree ordering for jsonb datums is seldom of great interest, but for completeness it is:
The jsonb data type supports array-style subscripting expressions to extract and modify elements. Nested values can be indicated by chaining subscripting expressions, following the same rules as the path argument in the jsonb_set function. If a jsonb value is an array, numeric subscripts start at zero, and negative integers count backwards from the last element of the array. Slice expressions are not supported. The result of a subscripting expression is always of the jsonb data type.
UPDATE statements may use subscripting in the SET clause to modify jsonb values. Subscript paths must be traversable for all affected values insofar as they exist. For instance, the path val['a']['b']['c'] can be traversed all the way to c if every val, val['a'], and val['a']['b'] is an object. If any val['a'] or val['a']['b'] is not defined, it will be created as an empty object and filled as necessary. However, if any val itself or one of the intermediary values is defined as a non-object such as a string, number, or jsonb null, traversal cannot proceed so an error is raised and the transaction aborted.
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