“14 years ago, we got JSON and Postgres. I have a secret. We cheated… we validated, it was valid JSON and threw it into a text field. And every headline that came out that year is like, Postgres is now a document database. And I'm like, well, I like the headline, but it's like, no, this is not like actual JSON compressed. There's no indexing for it.”
The Changelog · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Context
Kerstiens, a longtime Postgres advocate, on the history of the database's JSON support. The first version, in Postgres 9.2, only checked that the JSON was valid; proper binary JSON with indexing came later, in 9.4.
Transcript
9.4 was JSON B, 9.2 was JSON. Okay. So that was, oh, that was almost 14 years ago.
2010. Yeah.
14 years ago, we got JSON and Postgres. I have a secret. We cheated. Okay. Finally, we validated, it was valid JSON and threw it into a text field. And every headline that came out that year is like, Postgres is now a document database. And I'm like, well, I like the headline, but it's like, no, this is not like actual JSON compressed. There's no indexing for it. But like, man, the headlines are great, right? Like, hey, long live Postgres, it's now a document database.
Right.
Two years later, we got JSON B. I love my colleague Will describes it as like the B stands for better. It's, you know, a binary representation of JSON on disk. You can have like gen indexes. So like, man, this is probably the biggest release in 10 years since JSON B. And one of the, to me, the…
Never, yeah, the thankless job of being good, I suppose. Being good and being boring, you know, no surprises, no drama, no extras.
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