On 10/24/19 2:17 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
On Wed, 2019-10-23 at 13:00 -0600, Stuart McGraw wrote:
It is less sensible with compound values where the rule can apply to
individual scalar components.
I agree that JSON can sensibly be viewed as a composite value, but ...
And indeed that is what Postgresql does
for another compound type:
# select array_replace(array[1,2,3],2,NULL);
array_replace
---------------
{1,NULL,3}
The returned value is not NULL. Why the inconsistency between the array
type and json type?
... the flaw in this argument is that the array element is actually
a SQL NULL when we're done. To do something similar in the JSON case,
we have to translate SQL NULL to JSON null, and that's cheating to
some extent. They're not the same thing (and I'll generally resist
proposals to, say, make SELECT 'null'::json IS NULL return true).
Maybe it's okay to make this case work like that, but don't be too
high and mighty about it being logically clean; it isn't.
regards, tom lane
Sure, but my point was not that this was a perfect "logically clean"
answer, just that the argument, which was made multiple times, that
the entire result should be NULL because "that's the way SQL NULLs
work" is not really right.
It does seem to me that mapping NULL to "null" is likely a workable
approach but that's just my uninformed opinion.
