object mapping for json/jsonb columns

Jan Bernitt <jaanbernitt@gmail.com>

From: Jan Bernitt <jaanbernitt@gmail.com>
To: pgsql-sql@lists.postgresql.org
Date: 2024-08-27T12:28:58Z
Lists: pgsql-sql
Hi!

I hope this is the right group to ask about SQL questions.

I did quite some research but could not find a satisfactory solution so I
hope to find it by asking this mailing list.

I have a jsonb column which holds objects used as a map. Let's assume
something like this

    {"key1":{...}, "key2":{...}, ...}

As you see each value in this object map is itself an object. Let's assume
each looks like this

    {"value": 1, "meta": [...]}

Now I want to get rid of the "meta" part.

So this might be in a query or as an update where I actually strip the
"meta" attribute in a bulk update. The crux is that I don't know any of the
keys or that I want to do this for each of them.

What seems to be missing is a "map" (projection) function.

Let's say I want to remove the attribute using #- it seems that I cannot
specify "any name" for the 1. path segment

   mapproperty #- {*,meta}

That does not work as * is not valid for "any name"

Similarly, when selecting a path there is [*] for any array element but I
could not find a working solution for any name in an object.

The only solutions I found were super complicated transformations that map
the JSON to DB records, manipulate that to the shape and selection desired
to then put it together to a JSON object again. That seems so overly
complicated and has to be so much slower than a simple mapping function
where I just specify what I want the original value (object) to be mapped
to. In my case I would simply extract "value" to get rid of "meta".
It seems odd to me that something so simple would not be possible while
staying in the JSON(B) world so hopefully I just don't know how.

Many thanks
Jan