Re: WIP Incremental JSON Parser

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>

From: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
To: Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>
Cc: PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2024-01-03T13:45:06Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Wed, Jan 3, 2024 at 6:57 AM Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:
> Yeah. One idea I had yesterday was to stash the field names, which in
> large JSON docs tent to be pretty repetitive, in a hash table instead of
> pstrduping each instance. The name would be valid until the end of the
> parse, and would only need to be duplicated by the callback function if
> it were needed beyond that. That's not the case currently with the
> parse_manifest code. I'll work on using a hash table.

IMHO, this is not a good direction. Anybody who is parsing JSON
probably wants to discard the duplicated labels and convert other
heavily duplicated strings to enum values or something. (e.g. if every
record has {"color":"red"} or {"color":"green"}). So the hash table
lookups will cost but won't really save anything more than just
freeing the memory not needed, but will probably be more expensive.

> The parse_manifest code does seem to pfree the scalar values it no
> longer needs fairly well, so maybe we don't need to to anything there.

Hmm. This makes me wonder if you've measured how much actual leakage there is?

-- 
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com



Commits

  1. Post review fixes for test_json_parser test module

  2. Shrink test file for test_json_parser module

  3. Add support for incrementally parsing backup manifests

  4. Introduce a non-recursive JSON parser

  5. Use incremental parsing of backup manifests.