Hacker News Reader

Comment by guptaneil | Hacker News Reader

Considering Postgres is the first relational database to support jsonb, portability (which is the main benefit of drivers) doesn't really apply. Any decent driver or framework should let you write native psql commands, so you should be able to start using this as soon as it's released.

View on HN

Being able to use Jsonb through a framework and fully utilize it (through it) are not the same things. I will be definitely use it soon, but unless it's fully supported in frameworks (...) it won't be widely accepted.

Seems like there is room for a PostgreSQL-only ORM that specifically makes all these nice features available. Anyone heard of such a thing?

Most "frameworks"/ORM can provide database-specific features, and it's especially easy for field types. e.g. http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/rel_0_9/dialects/postgresql.ht... (data types local to SQL Alchemy's Postgres dialect) or https://github.com/djangonauts/django-hstore (hstore in Django)

There isn't really a need, though. SQLAlchemy exposes all of SQL, most unique things dialects offer and it makes it very easy to add types too.

Not exactly a PostgreSQL-only ORM

The excellent slick-pg library which extends the FRM library slick. https://github.com/tminglei/slick-pg

Not really an ORM but highly integrated with Postgres: https://github.com/ngs-doo/revenj

There are ORMs like SQLAlchemy (Python) and Sequel (Ruby) which try to expose as much as possible of the features of all supported databases. It is common for Sequel to add support for new PostgreSQL features while the new PostgreSQL version is still in beta testing.

Rails already has support for Postgres' json type, I don't doubt that they'll add jsonb support asap.

What's involved in supporting JSONB in Rails? Given that you probably want access to the entire JSON blob at the Rails level, aren't you good to go already?

Abstraction layers (such as drivers) have significant utility beyond portability.

Sure, but it's also nice to have a layer of abstraction over psql. I personally really enjoy working with Django's ORM, for example, over writing native queries.

Two new features in 1.7 might make it easy to extend the ORM yourself:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/custom-look...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com