jsonb.c

The original design used an array of offsets into the variable-length
portion of a JSONB container.  However, such an array is basically
uncompressible by simple compression techniques such as TOAST's LZ
compressor.  That's bad enough, but because the offset array is at the
front, it tended to trigger the give-up-after-1KB heuristic in the TOAST
code, so that the entire JSONB object was stored uncompressed; which was
the root cause of bug #11109 from Larry White.

To fix without losing the ability to extract a random array element in O(1)
time, change this scheme so that most of the JEntry array elements hold
lengths rather than offsets.  With data that's compressible at all, there
tend to be fewer distinct element lengths, so that there is scope for
compression of the JEntry array.  Every N'th entry is still an offset.
To determine the length or offset of any specific element, we might have
to examine up to N preceding JEntrys, but that's still O(1) so far as the
total container size is concerned.  Testing shows that this cost is
negligible compared to other costs of accessing a JSONB field, and that
the method does largely fix the incompressible-data problem.

While at it, rearrange the order of elements in a JSONB object so that
it's "all the keys, then all the values" not alternating keys and values.
This doesn't really make much difference right at the moment, but it will
allow providing a fast path for extracting individual object fields from
large JSONB values stored EXTERNAL (ie, uncompressed), analogously to the
existing optimization for substring extraction from large EXTERNAL text
values.

Bump catversion to denote the incompatibility in on-disk format.
We will need to fix pg_upgrade to disallow upgrading jsonb data stored
with 9.4 betas 1 and 2.

Heikki Linnakangas and Tom Lane