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Comment by ddebernardy | Hacker News Reader

FWIW and insofar as I can recollect, JSON was supported by Postgres before Mongo was a thing, and Mongo was built based on Postgres.

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No, that's not correct: Initial json support in PG was added in early 2012 https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit... whereas mongodb was made public in 2009, according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB

I don't see how Mongo was built based on Postgres, either?

My guess is the grandparent is (mis-)remembering the kerfuffle[0] around mongo shipping a copy of PG as a "BI Connector". But yeah, the timeline is off, that was in 2015.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10697692

Actually, no. I'm remembering asking myself how Mongo worked back when it launched, and reading somewhere that it was a heavily modded Postgres under the hood (like Amazon Redshift, which makes no secret about it, since).

I might be misremembering, though. And there's a possibility that what I read then was inaccurate.

I might admittedly be remembering this wrong, but I seem to recollect that Postgres had a couple of (unofficial) contrib modules to support JSON back in 2008 or so, and that (unfortunately buried in Postgres vs Mongo articles) the initial release of Mongo was actually a fork of Postgres for all practical intents.

The relevant data structures and indexing mechanisms (hstore, tsvector, gin, gist) were all available -- if only experimentally -- before Mongo launched.

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