Schinckel.net

slugify() for postgres (almost)

A recent discussion in #django suggested “what we need is a PG slugify function”.

The actual algorithm in Django for this is fairly simple, and easy to follow. Shouldn’t be too hard to write it in SQL.

Function slugify(value, allow_unicode=False).

  • Convert to ASCII if allow_unicode is false
  • Remove characters that aren’t alphanum, underscores, hyphens
  • Strip leading/trailing whitespace
  • Convert to lowercase
  • Convert spaces to hyphens
  • Remove repeated hyphens

(As an aside, the comment in the django function is slightly misleading: if you followed the algorithm there, you’d get a different result with respect to leading trailing whitespace. I shall submit a PR).

We can write an SQL function that uses the Postgres unaccent extension to get pretty close:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION slugify("value" TEXT, "allow_unicode" BOOLEAN)
RETURNS TEXT AS $$

  WITH "normalized" AS (
    SELECT CASE
      WHEN "allow_unicode" THEN "value"
      ELSE unaccent("value")
    END AS "value"
  ),
  "remove_chars" AS (
    SELECT regexp_replace("value", E'[^\\w\\s-]', '', 'gi') AS "value"
    FROM "normalized"
  ),
  "lowercase" AS (
    SELECT lower("value") AS "value"
    FROM "remove_chars"
  ),
  "trimmed" AS (
    SELECT trim("value") AS "value"
    FROM "lowercase"
  ),
  "hyphenated" AS (
    SELECT regexp_replace("value", E'[-\\s]+', '-', 'gi') AS "value"
    FROM "trimmed"
  )
  SELECT "value" FROM "hyphenated";

$$ LANGUAGE SQL STRICT IMMUTABLE;

I’ve used a CTE to get each step as a seperate query: you can do it with just two levels if you don’t mind looking at nested function calls:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION slugify("value" TEXT, "allow_unicode" BOOLEAN)
RETURNS TEXT AS $$

  WITH "normalized" AS (
    SELECT CASE
      WHEN "allow_unicode" THEN "value"
      ELSE unaccent("value")
    END AS "value"
  )
  SELECT regexp_replace(
    trim(
      lower(
        regexp_replace(
          "value",
          E'[^\\w\\s-]',
          '',
          'gi'
        )
      )
    ),
    E'[-\\s]+', '-', 'gi'
  ) FROM "normalized";

$$ LANGUAGE SQL STRICT IMMUTABLE;

To get the default value for the second argument, we can have an overloaded version with only a single argument:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION slugify(TEXT)
RETURNS TEXT AS 'SELECT slugify($1, false)' LANGUAGE SQL IMMUTABLE STRICT;

Now for some tests. I’ve been using pgTAP lately, so here’s some tests using that:

BEGIN;

SELECT plan(7);

SELECT is(slugify('Hello, World!', false), 'hello-world');
SELECT is(slugify('Héllø, Wørld!', false), 'hello-world');
SELECT is(slugify('spam & eggs', false), 'spam-eggs');
SELECT is(slugify('spam & ıçüş', true), 'spam-ıçüş');
SELECT is(slugify('foo ıç bar', true), 'foo-ıç-bar');
SELECT is(slugify('    foo ıç bar', true), 'foo-ıç-bar');
SELECT is(slugify('你好', true), '你好');

SELECT * FROM finish();

ROLLBACK;

And we get one failing test:

=# SELECT is(slugify('你好', true), '你好');

          is
──────────────────────
 not ok 7            ↵
 # Failed test 7     ↵
 #         have:     ↵
 #         want: 你好
(1 row)

Time: 2.004 ms

It seems there is no way to get the equivalent to the python re.U flag on a postgres regular expression function, so that is as close as we can get.

Row Level Security in Postgres and Django

Postgres keeps introducing new things that pique my attention. One of the latest ones of these is Row Level Permissions, which essentially hides rows that a given database user cannot view. There’s a bit more to it than that, a good writeup is at Postgres 9.5 feature highlight: Row-Level Security and Policies.

However, it’s worth noting that the way Django connects to a database uses a single database user. Indeed, if your users table is in your database, then you’ll need some way to connect to it to authenticate. I haven’t come up with a nice way to use the Postgres users for authentication within Django just yet.

I did have an idea about a workflow that may just work.

  • Single Postgres User is used for authentication (Login User).
  • Every Django user gets an associated Postgres User (Session User), that may not log in.
  • This Session User is automatically created using a Postgres trigger, whenever the Django users table is updated.
  • After authentication, a SET SESSION ROLE (or SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION) statement is used to change to the correct Session User for the remainder of the session.

Then, we can implement the Postgres Row Level Security policies as required.

Initially, I had thought that perhaps the Session Users would have the same level of access as the Login User, however tonight it occurred to me that perhaps this could replace the whole Django permissions concept.

We do have a few things we need to work out before this is a done deal.

  • The trigger function that performs the CREATE ROLE statement when the django users table is updated.
  • Some mechanism of handling GRANT and REVOKE statements.
  • Similarly, some mechanism for showing current permissions for the given user.
  • A middleware that sets the SESSION USER according to the django user.

The simplest part of this is the last one, so we will start there. We can (in the meantime) manually create the users and their permissions to see how well it all goes. No point doing work that doesn’t work.

from django.db import connection


class SetSessionAuthorization(object):
    def process_view(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        if request.user.pk:
          connection.cursor().execute(
            'SET SESSION SESSION AUTHORIZATION "django:{}"'.format(request.user.pk)
          )

We need to add this to our project’s middleware.

You’ll see we are using roles of the form django:<id>, which need to be quoted. We use the user id rather than the username, because usernames may be changed.

We’ll want to create a user for each of the existing Django users: I currently have a single user in this database, with id 1. I also have an existing SUPERUSER with the name django. We need to use a superuser if we are using SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION, which seems to be the best. I haven’t found anything which really does a good job of explaining how this and SET SESSION ROLE differ.

CREATE USER "django:1" NOLOGIN;
GRANT "django:1" TO django;
GRANT ALL ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO public;
GRANT ALL ON ALL SEQUENCES IN SCHEMA public TO public;

Note we have just for now enabled full access to all tables and sequences. This will remain until we find a good way to handle this.

We can start up a project using this, and see if it works. Unless I’ve missed something, then it should.

Next, we will turn on row-level-security for the auth_user table, and see if it works.

ALTER TABLE auth_user ENABLE ROW LEVEL SECURITY;

Then try to view the list of users (even as a django superuser). You should see an empty list.

We’ll turn on the ability to see our own user object:

CREATE POLICY read_own_data ON auth_user FOR
SELECT USING ('django:' || id = current_user);

Phew, that was close. Now we can view our user.

However, we can’t update it. Let’s fix that:

CREATE POLICY update_own_user_data ON auth_user FOR
UPDATE USING ('django:' || id = current_user)
WITH CHECK ('django:' || id = current_user);

We should be able to do some magic there to prevent a user toggling their own superuser status.

Let’s investigate writing a trigger function that creates a new ROLE when we update the django user.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION create_shadow_role()
RETURNS TRIGGER AS $$

BEGIN

  EXECUTE 'CREATE USER "django:' || NEW.id || '" NOLOGIN';
  EXECUTE 'GRANT "django:' || NEW.id || '" TO django';

  RETURN NULL;

END;

$$
LANGUAGE plpgsql
SECURITY DEFINER
SET search_path =  public, pg_temp
VOLATILE;


CREATE TRIGGER create_shadow_role
  AFTER INSERT ON auth_user
  FOR EACH ROW
  EXECUTE PROCEDURE create_shadow_role();

Note we still can’t create users from the admin (due to the RLS restrictions thata are there), so we need to resort to ./manage.py createsuperuser again.

Having done that, we should see that our new user gets a ROLE:

# \du
                                        List of roles
 Role name │                         Attributes                         │      Member of
───────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────
 django    │ Superuser                                                  │ {django:1,django:6}
 django:1  │ Cannot login                                               │ {}
 django:6  │ Cannot login                                               │ {}
 matt      │ Superuser, Create role, Create DB                          │ {}
 postgres  │ Superuser, Create role, Create DB, Replication, Bypass RLS │ {}

We should be able to write similar triggers for update. We can, for example, shadow the Django is_superuser attribute to the Postgres SUPERUSER attribute. I’m not sure if that’s a super idea or not.

But we can write a simple function that allows us to see if the current django user is a superuser:

CREATE FUNCTION is_superuser()
RETURNS BOOLEAN AS $$

SELECT is_superuser
FROM auth_user
WHERE 'django:' || id = current_user

$$ LANGUAGE SQL;

We can now use this to allow superuser access to all records:

CREATE POLICY superuser_user_select ON auth_user
FOR SELECT USING (is_superuser);

CREATE POLICY superuser_user_update ON auth_user
FOR UPDATE USING (is_superuser)
WITH CHECK (is_superuser);

That gives us a fair bit of functionality. We still don’t have any mechanism for viewing or setting permissions. Because of the way Django’s permissions work, we can’t quite use the same trick but on the auth_user_user_permissions table, because we’d need to also look at the auth_user_groups table and auth_group_permissions.

I’m still not sure if this is a good idea or not, but it is a fun thought process.

Postgres Domains and Triggers

It occurred to me tonight (after rewriting my Tax File Number generation script in JavaScript, so it works on Text Expander Touch), that it might be nice to do TFN validation in Postgres.

You can write a function that validates a TFN (this is not the first version I wrote, this one is a bit more capable in terms of the range of values it accepts):

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION valid_tfn(TEXT)
RETURNS BOOLEAN AS $$

WITH weights AS (
  SELECT
    row_number() OVER (), weight
  FROM unnest('{1,4,3,7,5,8,6,9,10}'::integer[]) weight
),
digits AS (
  SELECT
    row_number() OVER (),
    digit
  FROM (
    SELECT
      unnest(digit)::integer as digit
    FROM regexp_matches($1, '^(\d)(\d)(\d)[- ]?(\d)(\d)(\d)[- ]?(\d)(\d)(\d)$') AS digit
  ) digits
)

SELECT
  COALESCE(sum(weight * digit) % 11 = 0, FALSE)
FROM weights INNER JOIN digits USING (row_number);

$$ LANGUAGE SQL IMMUTABLE;

Once you have this (which will incidentally limit to 9 digits, and optional spacer items of - or ), you may create a DOMAIN, that validates values:

CREATE DOMAIN tax_file_number AS TEXT
CONSTRAINT valid_tfn CHECK (valid_tfn(VALUE));

Now, we can test it:

# SELECT valid_tfn('123-456-789') ; --> FALSE
# SELECT valid_tfn('123 456 782') ; --> TRUE

However, we might want to convert our data into a canonical “format”: in this case, always store it as XXX-XXX-XXX. We can write a function that does this:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION normalise_tfn(text)
RETURNS tax_file_number AS $$

SELECT string_agg(block, '-'::text)::tax_file_number
FROM (
  SELECT unnest(value) AS block
  FROM regexp_matches($1, '(\d\d\d)', 'g') value
) value;

$$ LANGUAGE SQL IMMUTABLE;

But how can we make our data that we insert always stored in this format?

Postgres triggers to the rescue. We can’t do it as part of a Domain (although we probably could do it as part of a scalar type, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish).

Let’s set up a table to store our tax declarations in:

CREATE TABLE tax_declaration
(
  tax_declaration_id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
  tfn tax_file_number,
  lodgement_date date
);

And now create a trigger function and trigger:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION rewrite_tfn() RETURNS TRIGGER AS $$

BEGIN
  NEW.tfn = normalise_tfn(NEW.tfn);
  RETURN NEW;
END;

$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

CREATE TRIGGER rewrite_tfn BEFORE INSERT OR UPDATE ON tax_declaration
FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE rewrite_tfn();

Now, we can insert some data:

INSERT INTO tax_declaration (tfn, lodgement_date)
VALUES ('123456782', now()::date);

And now we can query it:

SELECT * FROM tax_declaration;

 tax_declaration_id |     tfn     | lodgement_date
--------------------+-------------+----------------
                  1 | 123-456-782 | 2015-10-13
(1 row)

Django second AutoField

Sometimes, your ORM just seems to be out to get you.

For instance, I’ve been investigating a technique for the most important data structure in a system to be essentially immuatable.

That is, instead of updating an existing instance of the object, we always create a new instance.

This requires a handful of things to be useful (and useful for querying).

  • We probably want to have a self-relation so we can see which object supersedes another. A series of objects that supersede one another is called a lifecycle.
  • We want to have a timestamp on each object, so we can view a snapshot at a given time: that is, which phase of the lifecycle was active at that point.
  • We should have a column that unique per-lifecycle: this makes for querying all objects of a lifecycle much simpler (although we can use a recursive query for that).
  • There must be a facility to prevent multiple heads on a lifecycle: that is, at most one phase of a lifecycle may be non-superseded.
  • The lifecycle phases needn’t be in the same order, or really have any differentiating features (like status). In practice they may, but for the purposes of this, they are just “what it was like at that time”.

I’m not sure these ideas will ever get into a released product, but the work behind them was fun (and all my private work).

The basic model structure might look something like:

class Phase(models.Model):
    phase_id = models.AutoField(primary_key=True)
    lifecycle_id = models.AutoField(primary_key=False, editable=False)

    superseded_by = models.OneToOneField('self',
        related_name='supersedes',
        null=True, blank=True, editable=False
    )
    timestamp = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

    # Any other fields you might want...

    objects = PhaseQuerySet.as_manager()

So, that looks nice and simple.

Our second AutoField will have a sequence generated for it, and the database will give us a unique value from a sequence when we try to create a row in the database without providing this column in the query.

However, there is one problem: Django will not let us have a second AutoField in a model. And, even if it did, there would still be some problems. For instance, every time we attempt to create a new instance, every AutoField is not sent to the database. Which breaks our ability to keep the lifecycle_id between phases.

So, we will need a custom field. Luckily, all we really need is the SERIAL database type: that creates the sequence for us automatically.

class SerialField(object):
    def db_type(self, connection):
        return 'serial'

So now, using that field type instead, we can write a bit more of our model:

class Phase(models.Model):
    phase_id = models.AutoField(primary_key=True)
    lifecycle_id = SerialField(editable=False)
    superseded_by = models.OneToOneField('self', ...)
    timestamp = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

    def save(self, **kwargs):
        self.pk = None
        super(Phase, self).save(**kwargs)

This now ensures each time we save our object, a new instance is created. The lifecycle_id will stay the same.

Still not totally done though. We currently aren’t handling a newly created lifecycle (which should be handled by the associated postgres sequence), nor are we marking the previous instance as superseded.

It’s possible, using some black magic, to get the default value for a database column, and, in this case, execute a query with that default to get the next value. However, that’s pretty horrid: not to mention it also runs an extra two queries.

Similarly, we want to get the phase_id of the newly created instance, and set that as the superseded_by of the old instance. This would require yet another query, after the INSERT, but also has the sinister side-effect of making us unable to apply the not-superseded-by-per-lifecycle requirement.

As an aside, we can investigate storing the self-relation on the other end - this would enable us to just do:

    def save(self, **kwargs):
        self.supersedes = self.pk
        self.pk = None
        super(Phase, self).save(**kwargs)

However, this turns out to be less useful when querying: we are much more likely to be interested in phases that are not superseded, as they are the “current” phase of each lifecycle. Although we could query, it would be running sub-queries for each row.

Our two issues: setting the lifecycle, and storing the superseding data, can be done with one Postgres BEFORE UPDATE trigger function:

CREATE FUNCTION lifecycle_and_supersedes()
RETURNS TRIGGER AS $$

  BEGIN
    IF NEW.lifecycle_id IS NULL THEN
      NEW.lifecycle_id = nextval('phase_lifecycle_id_seq'::regclass);
    ELSE
      NEW.phase_id = nextval('phase_phase_id_seq'::regclass);
      UPDATE app_phase
        SET superseded_by_id = NEW.phase_id
        WHERE group_id = NEW.group_id
        AND superseded_by_id IS NULL;
    END IF;
  END;

$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql VOLATILE;

CREATE TRIGGER lifecycle_and_supersedes
  BEFORE INSERT ON app_phase
  FOR EACH ROW
  EXECUTE PROCEDURE lifecycle_and_supersedes();

So, now all we need to do is prevent multiple-headed lifecycles. We can do this using a UNIQUE INDEX:

CREATE UNIQUE INDEX prevent_hydra_lifecycles
ON app_phase (lifecycle_id)
WHERE superseded_by_id IS NULL;

Wow, that was simple.

So, we have most of the db-level code written. How do we use our model? We can write some nice queryset methods to make getting the various bits easier:

class PhaseQuerySet(models.query.QuerySet):
    def current(self):
        return self.filter(superseded_by=None)

    def superseded(self):
        return self.exclude(superseded_by=None)

    def initial(self):
        return self.filter(supersedes=None)

    def snapshot_at(self, timestamp):
        return filter(timestamp__lte=timestamp).order_by('lifecycle_id', '-timestamp').distinct('lifecycle_id')

The queries generated by the ORM for these should be pretty good: we could look at sticking an index on the lifecycle_id column.

There is one more thing to say on the lifecycle: we can add a model method to fetch the complete lifecycle for a given phase, too:

    def lifecycle(self):
        return self.model.objects.filter(lifecycle_id=self.lifecycle_id)

(That was why I used the lifecycle_id as the column).

Whilst building this prototype, I came across a couple of things that were also interesting. The first was a mechanism to get the default value for a column:

def database_default(table, column):
    cursor = connection.cursor()
    QUERY = """SELECT d.adsrc AS default_value
               FROM   pg_catalog.pg_attribute a
               LEFT   JOIN pg_catalog.pg_attrdef d ON (a.attrelid, a.attnum)
                                                   = (d.adrelid,  d.adnum)
               WHERE  NOT a.attisdropped   -- no dropped (dead) columns
               AND    a.attnum > 0         -- no system columns
               AND    a.attrelid = %s::regclass
               AND    a.attname = %s"""
    cursor.execute(QUERY, [table, column])
    cursor.execute('SELECT {}'.format(*cursor.fetchone()))
    return cursor.fetchone()[0]

You can probably see why I didn’t want to use this. Other than the aforementioned two extra queries, it’s executing a query with data that comes back from the database. It may be possible to inject a default value into a table that causes it to do Very Bad Things™. We could sanitise it, perhaps ensure it matches a regular expression:

NEXTVAL = re.compile(r"^nextval\('(?P<sequence>[a-zA-Z_0-9]+)'::regclass\)$")

However, the trigger-based approach is nicer in every way.

The other thing I discovered, and this one is really nice, is a way to create an exclusion constraint that only applies if a column is NULL. For instance, ensure that no two classes for a given student overlap, but only if they are not superseded (or deleted).

ALTER TABLE "student_enrolments"
ADD CONSTRAINT "prevent_overlaps"
EXCLUDE USING gist(period WITH &&, student_id WITH =)
WHERE (
  superseded_by_id IS NULL
  AND
  status <> 'deleted'
);

Bowled over by Postgres

There’s a nice article at Bowled Over by SQL Window Functions by a chap called Dwain Camps. It’s written from the perspective of T-SQL, which has some differences to Postgres’s DDL and querying. I’ve reworked his stuff into what feels nice for me from a Postgressy perspective.

I’ll recap a couple of things he mentions, but you’ll probably want to head there and read that first.

  • Strike: all pins knocked down on the first ball of a frame. Scores 10 (from this frame), plus the total of whatever the next two balls knock down.
  • Spare: all pins knocked down on the second ball of a frame. Scores 10 (from this frame), plus how ever many pins you knock down on the next ball.
  • Open: at least one pin remains standing at the end of the frame. Score is how ever many pins you knocked down.

By convention, only the running tally is shown on the scoresheet. I’ve kept the frame score as the score for this frame only, and the total will contain the running total.

The first thing I do a bit differently is to use Postgres’ DOMAIN structures, which enables us to remove some of the check constraints, and simplify some others:

CREATE SCHEMA bowling;

CREATE DOMAIN bowling.frame_number AS integer
  CHECK ('[1,10]'::int4range @> VALUE)
  NOT NULL;

CREATE DOMAIN bowling.ball AS integer
  CHECK ('[0,10]'::int4range @> VALUE);

So, now we have two integer domains: the frame number may be between 1 and 10, and the ball pin count may be null, or between 0 and 10.

We’ll start by recreating the table structure: initially without constraints:

CREATE TABLE bowling.frame
(
  game_id INTEGER NOT NULL,
  player_id INTEGER NOT NULL,
  frame bowling.frame_number NOT NULL,
  ball1 bowling.ball NOT NULL,
  ball2 bowling.ball NULL,
  ball3 bowling.ball NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (game_id, player_id, frame)
);

Not much different to the original, other than using those fresh new domain types.

The other approach I’ve used is to use more constraints, but make them simpler. I’m also relying on the fact that X + NULL => NULL, which means we can leave off a heap of the constraint clauses.

We’ll start by preventing the (non-final) frames from exceeding the number of available pins. In the case of final frame, we still only allow a spare unless we have a strike already.

ALTER TABLE bowling.frame
ADD CONSTRAINT max_spare_unless_frame_10_strike CHECK
(
  ball1 + ball2 <= 10 OR (frame = 10 AND ball1 = 10)
);

This is as simple as it can be. Because ball 2 may be null but ball 1 may not, and each ball must be no greater than 10, this is enough to encapsulate the requirement. There is one slightly incorrect circumstance: a value of (10, 0) would be valid, which is strictly incorrect (ball 2 was never bowled). In the case of the calculations it’s all correct, but if a 0 was bowled immediately after a strike, it may be possible to insert that as ball 2, which would be misleading.

ALTER TABLE bowling.frame
ADD CONSTRAINT ball_2_never_bowled_after_strike CHECK
(
  ball2 IS NULL OR ball1 < 10 OR frame = 10
);

We can now prevent ball 3 from being set unless we are on frame 10.

ALTER TABLE bowling.frame
ADD CONSTRAINT ball_3_only_in_frame_10 CHECK
(
  ball3 IS NULL OR frame = 10
);

A follow-up to the previous constraint: we only get to bowl ball 3 if we have bowled ball 2, and scored a strike or spare already. Note, we may have a strike on the first ball, which means we might have more than 10.

ALTER TABLE bowling.frame
ADD CONSTRAINT ball3_only_if_eligible CHECK
(
  ball3 IS NULL OR (ball2 IS NOT NULL AND ball1 + ball2 >= 10)
);

Finally, we have some specific allowable conditions for that last ball. We already know that we must have scored a strike or spare with the first two balls, but we need to know how many pins are available to us.

If we scored a spare or two strikes, then we may have any number up to 10 to score now. Otherwise, we have however many pins were left by ball 2 (which means ball 1 must have been a strike).

ALTER TABLE bowling.frame
ADD CONSTRAINT ball3_max_spare_or_strike CHECK
(
  ball2 + ball3 <= 10
  OR
  ball1 + ball2 = 20
  OR
  ball1 + ball2 = 10
);

I find those constraints much easier to read that the original ones.

I’ve written a view, that uses a couple of Common Table Expressions (CTEs), as well as the window functions Dwain discussed.

CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW bowling.frame_score AS (
  WITH pin_counts AS (
    SELECT
      game_id,
      player_id,
      frame,
      ball1, ball2, ball3,
      -- Get the first ball from the next frame.
      -- Used by strike and spare.
      LEAD(ball1, 1) OVER (
        PARTITION BY game_id, player_id
        ORDER BY frame
      ) AS next_ball_1,
      -- Get the second ball from the next frame.
      -- Used by strike.
      LEAD(ball2, 1) OVER (
        PARTITION BY game_id, player_id
        ORDER BY frame
      ) AS next_ball_2,
      -- Get the first ball from the next next frame.
      -- Used by double-strike.
      LEAD(ball1, 2) OVER (
        PARTITION BY game_id, player_id
        ORDER BY frame
      ) AS next_next_ball_1
    FROM bowling.frame
  ),
  frame_counts AS (
    SELECT
      game_id,
      player_id,
      frame,
      ball1, ball2, ball3,
      CASE
      -- We will start with frame 10: when we have a strike
      -- or spare, we get all three balls.
      WHEN frame = 10 AND ball1 + ball2 >= 10 THEN
        ball1 + ball2 + ball3
      -- On a strike, we get the next two balls. This could
      -- be from the next frame, or include the first ball
      -- of the frame after that. Note that in frame 9, we will
      -- also look at the second ball from fram 10, rather than
      -- looking for a non-existent frame 11.
      WHEN ball1 = 10 THEN
        ball1 + next_ball_1 + (
          CASE WHEN next_ball_1 = 10 AND frame < 9 THEN
            next_next_ball_1
          ELSE
            next_ball_2
          END
        )
      -- In the case of a spare, grab the next ball. We already
      -- handled a spare on frame 10 above.
      WHEN ball1 + ball2 = 10 THEN
        ball1 + ball2 + next_ball_1
      -- Otherwise, it's just the two balls we bowled in this frame.
      ELSE
        ball1 + ball2
      END AS score
    FROM pin_counts
  )

  -- We have everything we need in the previous CTE, except that
  -- shows us the frame score, rather than the running tally.
  -- We need to do that in another window function here, but
  -- only calculate a value when the frame's wave function has
  -- collapsed (ie, it's score is known).
  SELECT
    frame_counts.*,
    CASE WHEN score IS NOT NULL THEN
      SUM(score) OVER (
        PARTITION BY game_id, player_id
        ORDER BY frame
        ROWS UNBOUNDED PRECEDING
      )
    ELSE NULL END AS total
  FROM frame_counts
);

Again, I think this is a simpler query, and easier to read. But, I guess I wrote it.

We can insert the same data as used there, and look at our results:

-- Game 1
INSERT INTO bowling.frame VALUES
  (1, 1, 1, 7, 2, NULL),
  (1, 1, 2, 3, 7, NULL),
  (1, 1, 3, 6, 4, NULL),
  (1, 1, 4, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (1, 1, 5, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (1, 1, 6, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (1, 1, 7, 9, 1, NULL),
  (1, 1, 8, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (1, 1, 9, 8, 1, NULL),
  (1, 1, 10, 6, 3, NULL);

-- Game 2
INSERT INTO bowling.frame VALUES
  (2, 1, 1, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (2, 1, 2, 3, 7, NULL),
  (2, 1, 3, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (2, 1, 4, 6, 4, NULL),
  (2, 1, 5, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (2, 1, 6, 9, 1, NULL),
  (2, 1, 7, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (2, 1, 8, 8, 2, NULL),
  (2, 1, 9, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (2, 1, 10, 7, 3, 10);

-- Game 3
INSERT INTO bowling.frame VALUES
  (3, 1, 1, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (3, 1, 2, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (3, 1, 3, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (3, 1, 4, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (3, 1, 5, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (3, 1, 6, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (3, 1, 7, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (3, 1, 8, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (3, 1, 9, 10, NULL, NULL),
  (3, 1, 10, 10, 10, 10);

$ SELECT * FROM frame_score;

 game_id | player_id | frame | ball1 | ball2  | ball3  | score | total
---------+-----------+-------+-------+--------+--------+-------+-------
       1 |         1 |     1 |     7 |      2 | <NULL> |     9 |     9
       1 |         1 |     2 |     3 |      7 | <NULL> |    16 |    25
       1 |         1 |     3 |     6 |      4 | <NULL> |    20 |    45
       1 |         1 |     4 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    30 |    75
       1 |         1 |     5 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    29 |   104
       1 |         1 |     6 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    20 |   124
       1 |         1 |     7 |     9 |      1 | <NULL> |    20 |   144
       1 |         1 |     8 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    19 |   163
       1 |         1 |     9 |     8 |      1 | <NULL> |     9 |   172
       1 |         1 |    10 |     6 |      3 | <NULL> |     9 |   181
       2 |         1 |     1 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    20 |    20
       2 |         1 |     2 |     3 |      7 | <NULL> |    20 |    40
       2 |         1 |     3 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    20 |    60
       2 |         1 |     4 |     6 |      4 | <NULL> |    20 |    80
       2 |         1 |     5 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    20 |   100
       2 |         1 |     6 |     9 |      1 | <NULL> |    20 |   120
       2 |         1 |     7 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    20 |   140
       2 |         1 |     8 |     8 |      2 | <NULL> |    20 |   160
       2 |         1 |     9 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    20 |   180
       2 |         1 |    10 |     7 |      3 |     10 |    20 |   200
       3 |         1 |     1 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    30 |    30
       3 |         1 |     2 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    30 |    60
       3 |         1 |     3 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    30 |    90
       3 |         1 |     4 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    30 |   120
       3 |         1 |     5 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    30 |   150
       3 |         1 |     6 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    30 |   180
       3 |         1 |     7 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    30 |   210
       3 |         1 |     8 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    30 |   240
       3 |         1 |     9 |    10 | <NULL> | <NULL> |    30 |   270
       3 |         1 |    10 |    10 |     10 |     10 |    30 |   300
(30 rows)

Building the average scores for a player is likewise similar. Because I’m using a VIEW, I can jut reference that.

SELECT
  player_id,
  AVG(total) as average
FROM frame_score
WHERE frame=10
GROUP BY player_id;

 player_id |       average
-----------+----------------------
         1 | 227.0000000000000000
(1 row)

I’m fairly sure I’ve rewritten the constraints correctly, but may have missed some. Here are some of the condition tests that show invalid constraints:

$ INSERT INTO bowling.frame VALUES(1, 2, 0, 9, NULL, NULL);
ERROR:  value for domain frame_number violates check constraint "frame_number_check"
Time: 0.405 ms
$ INSERT INTO bowling.frame VALUES(1, 2, 1, 11, NULL, NULL);
ERROR:  value for domain ball violates check constraint "ball_check"
Time: 0.215 ms
$ INSERT INTO bowling.frame VALUES(1, 2, 1, -1, NULL, NULL);
ERROR:  value for domain ball violates check constraint "ball_check"
Time: 0.218 ms
$ INSERT INTO bowling.frame VALUES(1, 2, 1, 8, 3, NULL);
ERROR:  new row for relation "frame" violates check constraint "max_spare_unless_frame_10_strike"
DETAIL:  Failing row contains (1, 2, 1, 8, 3, null).
Time: 0.332 ms
$ INSERT INTO bowling.frame VALUES(1, 2, 1, 8, 1, 1);
ERROR:  new row for relation "frame" violates check constraint "ball3_only_if_eligible"
DETAIL:  Failing row contains (1, 2, 1, 8, 1, 1).
Time: 0.392 ms
$ INSERT INTO bowling.frame VALUES(1, 2, 1, 8, 2, 1);
ERROR:  new row for relation "frame" violates check constraint "ball_3_only_in_frame_10"
DETAIL:  Failing row contains (1, 2, 1, 8, 2, 1).
Time: 0.327 ms
$ INSERT INTO bowling.frame VALUES(1, 2, 10, 8, 3, 1);
ERROR:  new row for relation "frame" violates check constraint "max_spare_unless_frame_10_strike"
DETAIL:  Failing row contains (1, 2, 10, 8, 3, 1).
Time: 0.340 ms
$ INSERT INTO bowling.frame VALUES(1, 2, 10, 8, 2, 11);
ERROR:  value for domain ball violates check constraint "ball_check"
Time: 0.200 ms
$ INSERT INTO bowling.frame VALUES(1, 2, 10, 10, NULL, 10);
ERROR:  new row for relation "frame" violates check constraint "ball3_only_if_eligible"
DETAIL:  Failing row contains (1, 2, 10, 10, null, 10).
Time: 0.316 ms
$ INSERT INTO bowling.frame VALUES(1, 2, 5, 10, 0, NULL);
ERROR:  new row for relation "frame" violates check constraint "ball_2_never_bowled_after_strike"
DETAIL:  Failing row contains (1, 2, 5, 10, 0, null).
Time: 0.307 ms
$ INSERT INTO bowling.frame VALUES(1, 2, 10, 10, 2, 9);
ERROR:  new row for relation "frame" violates check constraint "ball3_max_spare_or_strike"
DETAIL:  Failing row contains (1, 2, 10, 10, 2, 9).
Time: 0.323 ms

Finally, I rewrote the pretty printer. It’s not quite perfect (I don’t like how I get the plus signs at the newline character), but it is workable:

WITH symbols AS (
  SELECT
    game_id, player_id, frame,
    CASE WHEN ball1 = 10 THEN 'X' ELSE ball1::text END as ball1,
    CASE WHEN ball2 IS NULL THEN ' '
         WHEN ball1 + ball2 = 10 THEN '/'
         WHEN ball1 = 10 AND ball2 = 10 THEN 'X'
         ELSE ball2::text
         END as ball2,
    CASE WHEN ball3 IS NULL THEN ' '
    WHEN ball3 = 10 THEN 'X'
    WHEN ball3 + ball2 = 10 THEN '/'
    ELSE ball3::text
    END as ball3,
    lpad(total::text, 5, ' ') as total
  FROM
    frame_score
  ORDER BY game_id, player_id, frame
), grouped_data AS (
  SELECT
    game_id,
    player_id,
    array_agg(ball1) ball1,
    array_agg(ball2) ball2,
    array_agg(ball3) ball3,
    array_agg(total) total
  FROM
    symbols
  GROUP BY
    game_id, player_id
)
SELECT
  game_id,
  player_id,
  ball1[1] || ' | ' || ball2[1] || ' ' || chr(10) || total[1] AS "1",
  ball1[2] || ' | ' || ball2[2] || ' ' || chr(10) || total[2] AS "2",
  ball1[3] || ' | ' || ball2[3] || ' ' || chr(10) || total[3] AS "3",
  ball1[4] || ' | ' || ball2[4] || ' ' || chr(10) || total[4] AS "4",
  ball1[5] || ' | ' || ball2[5] || ' ' || chr(10) || total[5] AS "5",
  ball1[6] || ' | ' || ball2[6] || ' ' || chr(10) || total[6] AS "6",
  ball1[7] || ' | ' || ball2[7] || ' ' || chr(10) || total[7] AS "7",
  ball1[8] || ' | ' || ball2[8] || ' ' || chr(10) || total[8] AS "8",
  ball1[9] || ' | ' || ball2[9] || ' ' || chr(10) || total[9] AS "9",
  ball1[10] || ' | ' || ball2[10] || ' | ' || ball3[10] || ' ' || chr(10) || lpad(total[10], 9, ' ') AS "10"
FROM grouped_data;

 game_id | player_id |   1    |   2    |   3    |   4    |   5    |   6    |   7    |   8    |   9    |     10
---------+-----------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+------------
       1 |         1 | 7 | 2 +| 3 | / +| 6 | / +| X |   +| X |   +| X |   +| 9 | / +| X |   +| 8 | 1 +| 6 | 3 |   +
         |           |     9  |    25  |    45  |    75  |   104  |   124  |   144  |   163  |   172  |       181
       2 |         1 | X |   +| 3 | / +| X |   +| 6 | / +| X |   +| 9 | / +| X |   +| 8 | / +| X |   +| 7 | / | X +
         |           |    20  |    40  |    60  |    80  |   100  |   120  |   140  |   160  |   180  |       200
       3 |         1 | X |   +| X |   +| X |   +| X |   +| X |   +| X |   +| X |   +| X |   +| X |   +| X | X | X +
         |           |    30  |    60  |    90  |   120  |   150  |   180  |   210  |   240  |   270  |       300
(3 rows)

That will do for now. Corrections welcome!

Postgres Tree Shootout part 2: Adjacency List using CTEs

This is the second post in an ongoing series dealing with storing Hierarchical or Tree data structures in Postgres. You should read the Introduction if you haven’t already.

This post contains the queries that illustrate how an Adjacency List model can be used to represent a Hierarchical set of data, including data definitions, and the various operations that have been defined in the aforementioned introduction.

I’ve discussed Adjacency Lists in the past, but I’ll quickly recap why I think they are good.

  • They are conceptually simple to understand
  • They enforce referential integrity
  • They can be modelled with most ORMs without any extra infrastructure
  • Many of the operations are non-complex
  • Recursive queries allow us to perform the complex queries in reasonable time

To help build suspense (but more because I haven’t yet come up with a way to generate a nice reproducible, yet complex tree), this post may discuss the complexity of the queries, but will not contain any measurements.

Initial tree

Before each operation, our data will look like this (where parents point to children):

dc:date2014-11-26 11:27Z</dc:date>Canvas 1Layer 112345678910111213141516

We will assume reversion back to this structure after each operation: we could do this using a TRUNCATE followed by an INSERT; or we could run the operation in a transaction and rollback.

There may be a post which shows the effects of each of the queries below in a graphical form.

Table structure

Adjacency Lists are dead simple. Each node simply contains a reference to it’s parent node.

CREATE TABLE nodes (
  node_id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
  parent_id INTEGER REFERENCES nodes(node_id)
);

We can insert our data using a single statement:

INSERT INTO nodes VALUES
  (1, NULL),
  (2, 1),
  (3, 1),
  (4, 2),
  (5, 2),
  (6, 3),
  (7, 3),
  (8, 4),
  (9, 8),
  (10, NULL),
  (11, 10),
  (12, 11),
  (13, 11),
  (14, 12),
  (15, 12),
  (16, 12);

Insertions

Inserting a single leaf node is simple. To insert a single node as a child of node 13, for example:

INSERT INTO nodes (parent_id) VALUES (13);

Inserting a new root node is slightly more complicated. In most ORMs, we would probably do it in two queries: one to create the new node, and a second to update the other root nodes to point to this one. We’ll see that below.

We can do slightly better in raw SQL: UPDATE our table with the result of an INSERT ... RETURNING that occurs inside a Common Table Expression (CTE, or WITH query).

WITH parent AS (
  INSERT INTO nodes(parent_id)
  VALUES (NULL)
  RETURNING node_id
)
UPDATE nodes
SET parent_id = parent.node_id
FROM parent
WHERE parent_id IS NULL;

We can use the same pattern to insert an intermediate node in our tree. For instance, inserting a new node between nodes 11 and 12:

WITH created_node AS (
  INSERT INTO nodes(parent_id)
  VALUES (11)
  RETURNING node_id
)
UPDATE nodes
SET parent_id = created_node.node_id
FROM created_node
WHERE nodes.node_id = 12;

And our last insert, adding a child node, that gets it’s siblings as children. For instance, adding a new node under node 12, which gets all of node 12’s children as it’s children.

WITH created_node AS (
  INSERT INTO nodes(parent_id)
  VALUES (12)
  RETURNING node_id
)
UPDATE nodes
SET parent_id = created_node.node_id
FROM created_node
WHERE nodes.parent_id = 12;

All of these queries should perform relatively well: the CTE will be very simple (as it is no different to the single leaf insert), and the UPDATE should likewise be fairly simple: it needs to filter out which existing nodes do not need to be updated; and then it needs to update the remainder of the rows with the value pulled from the CTE.

This theoretically is only marginally more complex than just a simple UPDATE foo SET bar=baz WHERE quux IS NULL style query.

If we were using an ORM, we might need to do this in two queries: something like this (in Django):

# Insert new root node: all other root nodes now have this as a parent
new_node = Node.objects.create()
Node.objects.filter(parent=None).exclude(pk=new_node.pk).update(parent=new_node)
# Could possibly do as:
Node.objects.filter(parent=None).update(parent=Node.objects.create().pk)

# Insert new node, with a single child as it's child (and that child's previous
# parent as it's parent)
new_node = Node.objects.create(parent=old_node.parent)
old_node.parent = new_node
old_node.save()

# Insert new node, with children of that node's parent now children of the node.
new_node = parent_node.children.create()
parent_node.children.exclude(pk=new_node.pk).update(parent=new_node)
# Again, may be able to do:
parent_node.children.update(parent=parent_node.children.create().pk)

Note the required exclusion of the newly created node: we don’t have to do this in the CTE versions, as that doesn’t “exist” at the time the other part of the query runs.

Removals

Removing a single leaf node is no different than removing a row from a normal table. Removing node 9, for instance:

DELETE FROM nodes WHERE node_id = 9;

Because the information about parent-child relationships is stored in the child, we do not need to do anything else to maintain the tree.

To remove a single root node (in this case, node 1), and promote all children to root nodes themselves, we can do two queries:

UPDATE nodes SET parent_id = NULL WHERE parent_id = 1;
DELETE FROM nodes WHERE node_id = 1;

It may be possible to do this in a single query, similar to the CTE queries above, but I’m not sure of the benefit.

WITH deleted AS (
  DELETE FROM nodes
  WHERE node_id = 1
)
UPDATE nodes SET parent_id = NULL WHERE parent_id = 1;

The same pattern can be used for removing a node, and attaching it’s children to it’s parent. Here, we will remove node 2, and attach it’s children (4 and 5) as children of it’s parent, node 1:

UPDATE nodes
SET parent_id = (SELECT parent_id FROM nodes WHERE node_id = 2)
WHERE parent_id = 2;

DELETE from nodes WHERE node_id = 2;

This is a place where using a CTE might make things clearer - especially if we have the node-to-be-deleted’s id, but not it’s parent:

WITH deleted AS (
  DELETE FROM nodes
  WHERE node_id = 2
  RETURNING node_id, parent_id
)
UPDATE nodes
SET parent_id = deleted.parent_id
FROM deleted
WHERE nodes.parent_id = deleted.node_id;

Righto, now we are up to the traditionally “hard” things for an Adjacency List to perform. Dealing with removing an arbitrary depth of (sub)tree.

We’ll need to create a recursive CTE, and delete according to that. Let’s just select from that initially, so we can see what the CTE data will look like:

WITH RECURSIVE tree AS (
  SELECT node_id, ARRAY[]::integer[] AS ancestors
  FROM nodes WHERE parent_id IS NULL

  UNION ALL

  SELECT nodes.node_id, tree.ancestors || nodes.parent_id
  FROM nodes, tree
  WHERE nodes.parent_id = tree.node_id
)
SELECT * FROM tree;

 node_id | ancestors
---------+------------
       1 | {}
      10 | {}
       2 | {1}
       3 | {1}
      11 | {10}
       4 | {1,2}
       5 | {1,2}
       6 | {1,3}
       7 | {1,3}
      12 | {10,11}
      13 | {10,11}
       8 | {1,2,4}
      14 | {10,11,12}
      15 | {10,11,12}
      16 | {10,11,12}
       9 | {1,2,4,8}
(16 rows)

Coolio. So, on to our operations. Let’s remove the subtree starting with node 2. I’ll hide the CTE, since it will be the same for quite a few of these operations:

WITH RECURSIVE tree AS (...)
DELETE FROM nodes
WHERE node_id IN (
  SELECT node_id FROM tree WHERE 2 = ANY(tree.ancestors)
) OR node_id = 2;

The query is identical for a full tree (node 1 and descendants):

WITH RECURSIVE tree AS (...)
DELETE FROM nodes
WHERE node_id IN (
  SELECT node_id FROM tree WHERE 1 = ANY(tree.ancestors)
) OR node_id = 1;

And it’s nearly identical for just the descendants of a given node. Here, for all of node 2’s descendants, but not that node itself:

WITH RECURSIVE tree AS (...)
DELETE FROM nodes
WHERE node_id IN (
  SELECT node_id FROM tree WHERE 2 = ANY(tree.ancestors)
);

Moves

Because the relationship is stored purely on the child element, moving around trees and subtrees is very easy. We can start with moving subtree starting with 3 to underneath node 4:

UPDATE nodes
SET parent_id = 4 WHERE node_id = 3;

Nothing surprising there. Similarly, the query is identical for moving a leaf to a different parent, a root node into a tree, and turning a subtree into a full tree (making that node a root node).

UPDATE nodes SET parent_id = 6 WHERE node_id = 5;
UPDATE nodes SET parent_id = 8 WHERE node_id = 10;
UPDATE nodes SET parent_id = NULL WHERE node_id = 2;

The final move: all of node’s children to a different node is almost as simple:

UPDATE nodes SET parent_id = 5 WHERE parent_id = 12;

This seems to be a situation where Adjacency Lists are really good. None of these queries are any more complex than the simplest UPDATE you could think of.

Fetches

Using the same CTE, we can perform our fetches. We may need to extend it to deal with depths, but since the ancestors column contains ancestors starting with the root node, we could count stuff in there. Let’s see how it goes.

Descendants

Fetching all descendants of a given node just means we want to see if the node occurs at all in each row’s ancestors. To get all of node 10’s descendants:

WITH RECURSIVE tree AS (
  SELECT node_id, ARRAY[]::integer[] AS ancestors
  FROM nodes WHERE parent_id IS NULL

  UNION ALL

  SELECT nodes.node_id, tree.ancestors || nodes.parent_id
  FROM nodes, tree
  WHERE nodes.parent_id = tree.node_id
)
SELECT node_id FROM tree WHERE 10 = ANY(tree.ancestors);

However, we could improve this by starting with just the node we care about, or more specifically, it’s children:

WITH RECURSIVE tree AS (
  SELECT node_id, ARRAY[10]::integer[] AS ancestors FROM nodes WHERE parent_id = 10

  UNION ALL

  SELECT nodes.node_id, tree.ancestors || nodes.parent_id
  FROM nodes, tree
  WHERE nodes.parent_id = tree.node_id
)
SELECT node_id FROM tree;

Obviously, this is far less generic, but it is also significantly less complex. For starters, it only builds up the part of the tree we care about, and then just returns the node ids, rather than building up the whole tree, and then discarding the parts that are not required.

The same code can be used for determining the number of descendants, but with a COUNT(node_id) in the final query.

To get our depth-limited query, we can approach from two directions. To get the subtree to depth 2 from above:

WITH RECURSIVE tree AS (
  SELECT node_id, ARRAY[10]::integer[] AS ancestors FROM nodes WHERE parent_id = 10

  UNION ALL

  SELECT nodes.node_id, tree.ancestors || nodes.parent_id
  FROM nodes, tree
  WHERE nodes.parent_id = tree.node_id
  AND cardinality(tree.ancestors) < 2
)
SELECT node_id FROM tree;

To do the same in the more generic form have to look at how close the desired node is to the end of the ancestors array:

WITH RECURSIVE tree AS (
  SELECT node_id, ARRAY[]::integer[] AS ancestors
  FROM nodes WHERE parent_id IS NULL

  UNION ALL

  SELECT nodes.node_id, tree.ancestors || nodes.parent_id
  FROM nodes, tree
  WHERE nodes.parent_id = tree.node_id
)
SELECT node_id
FROM tree
WHERE ARRAY_POSITION(ancestors, 10) < ARRAY_LENGTH(ancestors, 1) - 2;

(Note that this is a bug fix on the original version of this post).

Ancestors

Fetching ancestors from our generic CTE is a bit simpler, because that data is already part of the query:

WITH RECURSIVE tree AS (
  SELECT node_id, ARRAY[]::integer[] AS ancestors
  FROM nodes WHERE parent_id IS NULL

  UNION ALL

  SELECT nodes.node_id, tree.ancestors || nodes.parent_id
  FROM nodes, tree
  WHERE nodes.parent_id = tree.node_id
) SELECT unnest(ancestors) FROM tree WHERE node_id = 15;

To do the equivalent of the hand-built CTE, we would need to start with the node, and build back the other way. It’s getting late here, so I can’t think of a way to do this right now that doesn’t get stuck doing infinite recursion.

The count query is an interesting one: we can just remove the need to unnest, and take the cardinality:

WITH RECURSIVE tree AS (
  SELECT node_id, ARRAY[]::integer[] AS ancestors
  FROM nodes WHERE parent_id IS NULL

  UNION ALL

  SELECT nodes.node_id, tree.ancestors || nodes.parent_id
  FROM nodes, tree
  WHERE nodes.parent_id = tree.node_id
) SELECT cardinality(ancestors) FROM tree WHERE node_id = 15;

The depth query is a little trickier. We want to know the ancestors of node 15, up to a depth of 2. If our ancestors array was in the reverse order, we should be able to unnest and limit.

WITH RECURSIVE tree AS (
  SELECT node_id, ARRAY[]::integer[] AS ancestors
  FROM nodes WHERE parent_id IS NULL

  UNION ALL

  SELECT nodes.node_id, nodes.parent_id || tree.ancestors
  FROM nodes, tree
  WHERE nodes.parent_id = tree.node_id
) SELECT unnest(ancestors) FROM tree WHERE node_id = 15 LIMIT 2;

We can do this because a node only has one parent: so limiting the number of ancestors (when sorted nearest ancestor first) is the same as limiting the depth.

Special queries

Fetching all leaf nodes is just a matter of excluding those that have a relationship to another node as it’s parent:

SELECT node_id FROM nodes
WHERE node_id NOT IN (
  SELECT parent_id FROM nodes WHERE parent_id IS NOT NULL
);

Trick for new players: if you leave off the WHERE clause in that sub-query, you won’t get any matches!

Fetching the number of leaf nodes is trivial.

Fetching root nodes (or the number of) is simpler than leaf nodes:

SELECT node_id FROM nodes
WHERE parent_id IS NULL;

Fetching non-leaf nodes, and non-root nodes is just negations of the two queries above:

SELECT node_id FROM nodes WHERE node_id IN (
  SELECT parent_id FROM nodes WHERE parent_id IS NOT NULL
);

SELECT node_id FROM nodes WHERE parent_id IS NOT NULL;

And the non-leaf, non-root nodes just combines these two queries:

SELECT node_id FROM nodes WHERE node_id IN (
  SELECT parent_id FROM nodes WHERE parent_id IS NOT NULL
) AND parent_id IS NOT NULL;

As an aside: there is also the inverse of this: nodes which are isolated (root AND leaf nodes):

SELECT node_id FROM nodes
WHERE parent_id IS NULL
AND node_id NOT IN (
  SELECT parent_id FROM nodes WHERE parent_id IS NOT NULL
);

Well, that’s our operations. Most of them are really simple. For anything that requires us to fetch or delete a whole subtree, we needed to revert to recursive CTEs, and for some of the other operations, using a CTE makes it simpler (and easier to understand).

Next, we will look at an alternative to the CTE operations, using a recursive view. From there, we should be able to look at a trigger-based approach that materializes our tree (node, ancestors) data in a table, and keeps it up to date. That’s, as I hinted, getting close to a Materialized Path approach, but keeps the conceptual simplicity of the Adjacency List, and hopefully prevents possible issues relating to referential integrity.

Postgres Tree Shootout part 1: Introduction.

I’ve written before about using Adjacency Lists, and even done some performance tests on querying them. Whilst reading a post today, it occurred to me that it might be worthwhile to do a comparison of the various methods of storing hierarchical data in Postgres, and the costs of the same operations on each of those.

This post is just an introduction, with an outline of what I plan to do to run these tests. Please feel free to suggest things that I have missed, or that might be an oversight at my end.

Tree Models

There are four methods of storing the relationships that might form a tree. This analysis will be limited to actual tree, rather than graph structures (no cycles). I plan to detail the data structures in a series of posts, one per method. In each case, where there are multiple ways to store the data, I will attempt to examine each of these.

Adjacency Lists, being the simplest to understand (and the ones I have spent more time on recently), will be discussed first.

Path Enumerations will be next, with a comparison of storing the data using the ltree extension, and using an ARRAY column.

Following this, I’ll make an attempt at using the Closure Table model: where each ancestor-descendant relationship is stored, rather than just the parent-child relationship.

Finally, I’ll have a crack at the Nested Set model. I’m not solidly behind this model for the types of data I’ve had to deal with, but it is a valid mechanism for storing and retrieving this data. Besides, it will be an interesting exercise to implement.

My plan to handle all of these is that all tree manipulation should be “automatic”, that is, adding a node (or removing one, or whatever) should not require explicit updating of the various metadata. This should all be handled by trigger functions on the tables themselves. Whether this turns out to be reasonable we shall see.

Operations

I plan to perform the same set of operations (on the same data, rather than randomly generated data) in all models, and compare the complexity and run-time of the various queries. I’m hoping to cover all of the operations that might be performed on a tree structure, so please add any more to the comments.

The data stored in the table will contain more than one tree: this means we can perform operations which add/remove root nodes/whole trees.

Insertions

  • Insert a single leaf node
  • Insert a single root node (all existing root nodes will then point to this)
  • Insert a single node partway through the tree, with the “replaced” node becoming a child of this (and this one keeps it’s children)
  • Insert a single node partway through the tree, with this node’s parent’s existing children all becoming children of the new node.

Removals

  • Remove a single leaf node
  • Remove a single root node (all children of this are promoted to root nodes)
  • Remove a single node partway through the tree: all children of this node then have their grand-parent as their parent.
  • Remove a subtree (a single non-root node and it’s descendants)
  • Remove a whole tree (a single root node and all descendants)
  • Remove all descendants of a specific node (but not the node itself)

Moves

  • Move a subtree from one parent to another
  • Move a single leaf node to a different parent
  • Move a root node into a tree
  • Make a subtree into a tree (turn a node into a root node).
  • Move all children of a node to a different parent

Fetches

  • Fetch all descendants of a given node
  • Fetch the number of descendants of a given node
  • Fetch descendants of a given node to a given depth
  • Fetch the number of descendants of a given node to a given depth
  • Fetch all ancestors of a given node
  • Fetch the number of ancestors of a given node
  • Fetch ancestors of a given node to a given depth
  • Fetch the number of ancestors of a given node to a given depth I don’t think this makes any sense.
  • Fetch all leaf nodes
  • Fetch the number of leaf nodes
  • Fetch all root nodes
  • Fetch the number of root nodes
  • Fetch all non-leaf nodes
  • Fetch the number of non-leaf nodes
  • Fetch all non-root nodes
  • Fetch the number of non-root nodes
  • Fetch all non-root, non-leaf nodes
  • Fetch the number of non-root, non-leaf nodes

Aggregating Ranges in Postgres

Postgres’ range types are very cool. You can use them to store, as you may guess, a value that is a range. There are several included range types, and it’s possible to create your own range type. For now, we’ll just look at using a simple int4range: although everything in principle could be applied to any range type.

Firstly, a quick discussion of how the range types work.

There is a literal form, and then a functional form:

SELECT '(2,17]'::int4range;

  int4range
 -----------
  [3,18)
 (1 row)

SELECT int4range(2, 17, '(]');

 int4range
-----------
 [3,18)
(1 row)

The first thing you’ll notice is that postgres converts them to canonical form. We can provide the bound-types: inclusive or exclusive upper and lower values. This is the same notation you might see if you have done some mathematics.

You can also omit the upper and/or lower bounds to get a range object that goes to ±Infinity. Finally, you can also have empty ranges.

There are several operations that can be performed on a range. The most interesting one from the perspective of this article is the UNION operation.

SELECT '[3,17)'::int4range + '[10,20)';

 ?column?
----------
 [3,20)
(1 row)

You’ll get an error if your union does not result in a contiguous range. There is no way to store a discontinuous range in postgres (but you could store them in an array of int4range[], for instance).

What about if we want to get the aggregate range from a set of ranges?

SELECT value FROM range_test ;
  value
---------
 [2,3)
 [3,4)
 [11,12)
 [5,12)
 [4,5)
(4 rows)

What we’d like to be able to do is something like:

SELECT aggregate_union(value) FROM range_test;
 aggregate_union
-----------------
     '[2,12)'

Obviously, this would be subject to the same limitation on union: we would get an error (or a NULL) if the aggregate range was not continuous.

Perhaps even more useful might be a function that would show us what ranges are missing from a set of ranges. With the same data above, we might see:

SELECT missing_ranges(value) FROM range_test ;                                   missing_ranges
------------------
 {"(,2)","[12,)"}
(1 row)

Indeed, the latter is probably more useful, and, as it turns out, is simpler to perform.

We’ll start with the aggregate_union though, because it’s fun. It’s also the way I worked out the nicer solution for the last problem.

We need to create a postgres AGGREGATE to, well, aggregate the data from columns in a table. A naïve solution might be:

CREATE FUNCTION _aggregate_union(int4range, int4range)
RETURNS int4range AS $$

SELECT COALESCE(
  $1 + $2, $1, $2
);

$$ LANGUAGE SQL;

CREATE AGGREGATE aggregate_union (int4range) (
  sfunc = _aggregate_union,
  stype = int4range
);

This actually works to some degree: but only if the ranges in the query are already sorted, as each iteration of the aggregation function must result in a valid range:

SELECT aggregate_union(value) FROM (SELECT value FROM range_test ORDER BY value) x;
 aggregate_union
-----------------
 [2,12)
(1 row)

However, if the data is not sorted, it will fail.

Instead, we have to either collect all of the items in an array, sort this, and then attempt to aggregate, or, at each step, aggregate as much as possible, and add the current element to the array if we cannot perform a union.

The simpler of these (but will take more memory) is to stick them all into an array, and then sort and apply the union. We only need to define one new function to do it this way:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION _aggregate_union(int4range[])
RETURNS int4range AS $$

DECLARE
  _range int4range;
  _current int4range;

BEGIN

  _current := (SELECT x FROM unnest($1) x ORDER BY x LIMIT 1);

  FOR _range IN SELECT unnest($1) x ORDER BY x LOOP
    IF _range && _current OR _range -|- _current THEN
      _current := _current + _range;
    ELSE
      RETURN NULL;
    END IF;
  END LOOP;

  RETURN _current;
  END;

$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

CREATE AGGREGATE aggregate_union (int4range) (
  stype = int4range[],
  sfunc = array_append,
  finalfunc = _aggregate_union
);

Lets test it out:

SELECT aggregate_union(value) FROM range_test;
 aggregate_union
-----------------
 [2,12)
(1 row)

Bingo.

But what about the other case? What if we care more about what data is missing?

After spending way too many hours on playing around with this, I hit on the idea of using a window function, lead to get the data from the “next” row in the query.

SELECT
  lower(value),
  upper(value),
  lead(lower(value)) OVER (ORDER BY lower(value) NULLS FIRST)
FROM
  range_test
ORDER BY value;

This gets us most of the way. We can see the ones with upper >= lead indicate there is no gap between the ranges, so we can filter. However, we need to do this with a subquery to be able to get access to the columns correctly:

SELECT upper, lead FROM (
  SELECT
    lower(value),
    upper(value),
    lead(lower(value)) OVER (ORDER BY lower(value) NULLS FIRST)
  FROM
    range_test
  ORDER BY value
) x WHERE upper < lead OR (lead IS NULL AND upper IS NOT NULL);

We can aggregate these into an array, and then prefix with an element if our first object is not infinite-lower-bounded.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION missing_ranges(int4range[])
RETURNS int4range[] AS $$

DECLARE
  _range int4range;
  _missing int4range[];

BEGIN
  _missing := (SELECT
    array_agg(int4range(upper, lead, '[)'))
    FROM (
      SELECT lower(x), upper(x), lead(lower(x)) OVER (ORDER BY lower(x) NULLS FIRST)
      FROM unnest($1) x ORDER BY lower NULLS FIRST
    ) x
    WHERE upper < lead OR (lead IS NULL AND upper IS NOT NULL)
  );

  _range := (SELECT x FROM unnest($1) x ORDER BY x LIMIT 1);

  IF NOT lower_inf(_range) THEN
    _missing := array_prepend(int4range(NULL, lower(_range), '[)'), _missing);
  END IF;

  RETURN _missing;
END;

$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

CREATE AGGREGATE missing_ranges (int4range) (
  sfunc = array_append,
  stype = int4range[],
  finalfunc = missing_ranges
);

All too easy.

It is possible to rewrite this function just using SQL, but it’s not pretty:

SELECT array_agg(value)
FROM
  (SELECT value
   FROM
     (SELECT int4range(UPPER, lead, '[)') AS value
      FROM
        (SELECT NULL AS LOWER,
                NULL::integer AS UPPER,
                LOWER(a.value) AS lead
         FROM range_test a
         ORDER BY a.value LIMIT 1) w
      WHERE lead IS NOT NULL
      UNION SELECT int4range(UPPER, lead, '[)')
      FROM
        (SELECT LOWER(b.value),
                UPPER(b.value),
                lead(LOWER(b.value)) OVER (ORDER BY LOWER(b.value) NULLS FIRST)
         FROM range_test b
         ORDER BY b.value) x
      WHERE UPPER IS NOT NULL
        AND (LEAD IS NULL OR UPPER < lead)
      ) y
   ORDER BY value) z;

I haven’t tried to see which is faster.

Horizontal Partitioning in Postgres

It never surprises me when I find another neat feature of Postgres that makes doing a potentially difficult task simple. Today, I discovered that since 9.0, Postgres has supported a really powerful way to horizontally partition data into separate tables.

For those who haven’t heard of the concept before, horizontal partitioning is where different rows are stored in different tables, depending upon something about the data within the row.

For instance, we could partition audit data into tables based upon the timestamp of the action. Thus, all entries created during October, 2014 would be stored in a table called audit_2014_10, and entries created during March 2011 would be stored in a table called audit_2011_03. And so on. Alternatively, we could have a single table per year, or however we want to partition.

This is called “Range” partitioning.

There are a couple of ways you could think about doing this in a DBMS. You could have a writable view that redirects the writes to the correct table. The problem then is that when you add a new child table, you need to rewrite your view.

Instead, we can use Postgres’ neat table inheritance to handle all of this for you. Indeed, it is discussed in the Postgres documentation.

If we inherit one table from another, and do a query on the parent table, we will also get the rows that match the query from all child tables. That obviates the need for a view that uses UNION ALL or similar to fetch the data.

I’m going to use a toy example here, that just contains a single column.

CREATE TABLE "data" ("value" TIMESTAMPTZ);

CREATE TABLE "data_2014" (
  CHECK (
    "value" >= '2014-01-01' AND "value" < '2015-01-01')
) INHERITS ("data");

CREATE TABLE "data_2015" (
  CHECK (
    "value" >= '2015-01-01' AND "value" < '2016-01-01')
) INHERITS ("data");

This, however, is only part of the picture. Any data that is added to either of the child tables (or indeed the parent table, but we won’t be doing that), will be returned when we query the parent table.

But we want to ensure that data is partitioned out nicely. For that, we can use a trigger.

A naïve trigger may look something like:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION data_insert_trigger()
RETURNS TRIGGER AS $$

BEGIN

  IF (NEW.value >= '2014-01-01' AND NEW.value < '2015-01-01') THEN
    INSERT INTO data_2014 VALUES (NEW.*);
  ELSIF (NEW.value >= '2015-01-01' AND NEW.value < '2016-01-01') THEN
    INSERT INTO data_2015 VALUES (NEW.*);
  ELSE
    RAISE EXCEPTION 'Date out of range. Please fix the data_insert_trigger() function.';
  END IF;

  RETURN NULL;
END;

$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

As you can see by the ELSE clause, we will actually need to do maintainence on this function as we start to get data that falls outside of our existing ranges. We will also need to create a new table for those rows.

It would be nice if we could automatically create tables that are missing, and handle any arbitrary values.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION data_insert_trigger()
RETURNS TRIGGER AS $$

DECLARE
  table_name text;
  year integer;
  start text;
  finish text;

BEGIN
  year := date_part('year', NEW.value);
  table_name := 'data_' || year;
  start := year || '-01-01';
  finish := (year + 1) || '-01-01';

  PERFORM 1 FROM pg_tables WHERE tablename = table_name;

  IF NOT FOUND THEN
    EXECUTE
      'CREATE TABLE '
      || quote_ident(table_name)
      || ' (CHECK ("value" >= '
      || quote_literal(start)
      || ' AND "value" < '
      || quote_literal(finish)
      || ')) INHERITS (data)';
  END IF;

  EXECUTE
    'INSERT INTO '
    || quote_ident(table_name)
    || ' VALUES ($1.*)'
  USING NEW;

  RETURN NULL;
END;

$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

CREATE TRIGGER data_insert_trigger
BEFORE INSERT ON data
FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE data_insert_trigger();

You would also want to create any indexes on the child tables, as this is where they need to be, rather than the parent table.

This function is pretty neat: it first stores what the table name should be in a variable, as well as the two bounds for this table (start and finish). Then, we see if that table exists, and if not, create it. Finally, we then insert the values into the correct child table. I’m not sure I’d recommend using it as-is: it’s quite possibly subject to a race condition if two new records came in at the same time.

The one thing that was concerning me was that DDL changes to the parent table would not propagate to the child tables: however this turned out to not be an issue at all. Since I mostly use Django, I want as little hard stuff that would require custom migration operations.

ALTER TABLE data ADD COLUMN confirmed BOOLEAN DEFAULT false;

The other thing worth noting is that Postgres will do a really good job of limiting the tables that are accessed to those that contain the relevant data:

INSERT INTO data VALUES
  ('2014-01-06 09:00:00'),
  ('2015-01-09 12:00:00'),
  ('2016-02-22 15:39:00');

EXPLAIN
SELECT * FROM data
WHERE value > '2014-01-01'
AND value < '2014-07-01';

                                      QUERY PLAN
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Append  (cost=0.00..42.10 rows=12 width=8)
   ->  Seq Scan on data  (cost=0.00..0.00 rows=1 width=8)
         Filter: ((value > '2014-01-01 00:00:00'::timestamp with time zone) AND
                  (value < '2014-07-01 00:00:00'::timestamp with time zone))
   ->  Seq Scan on data_2014  (cost=0.00..42.10 rows=11 width=8)
         Filter: ((value > '2014-01-01 00:00:00'::timestamp with time zone) AND
                  (value < '2014-07-01 00:00:00'::timestamp with time zone))
 Planning time: 0.292 ms
(6 rows)

We see that only the data_2014 table is hit by the query. If your constraints do something like cast to DATE, then this may not happen. This was causing me some concern earlier, but letting Postgres coerce the data types fixed it.

However, you can’t use a tstzrange to query if you want these constraints to help the query planner:

-- Actually hits every table.
SELECT * FROM data WHERE value <@ '[2014-01-01, 2014-07-01)'::tstzrange;

It’s worth noting that if you change a value that would cause that row to belong in a different partition, this will fail.

There are moves afoot to have this feature more tightly integrated into Postgres, perhaps using a syntax like:

CREATE TABLE data (value TIMESTAMPTZ)
PARTITION BY RANGE (value)
(PARTITION data_2014 VALUES LESS THAN '2015-01-01');

CREATE PARTITION data_2015 ON data VALUES LESS THAN '2016-01-01';

It’s not clear to me how you actually define the range. It also seems counter-productive to have to manually create the partition tables.

There are also tools that might be useful to handle the heavy lifting, like pg_partman. I haven’t used this, but it looks interesting.

Adding JSON(B) operators to PostgreSQL

This is a followup/replacement post for this older post. In it, I discussed a way to use PL/python to perform function (and in turn operations) on JSON data. Don’t do that, it’s way too slow.

It’s actually possible, using raw SQL (and some handy functions) to perform some of the operations that are “missing” from the JSON(B) datatypes in Postgres.

In all cases, I’ll work with just JSONB as the input/output formats. In practice, when I first wrote these, I wrote up to four versions of each (JSON+JSON, JSON+JSONB, JSONB+JSON, JSONB+JSONB). I believe it’s possible to write polymorphic versions of these functions, but I’m not that familiar with them just yet.

We’ll start with concatenation: basically joining two JSONB objects into one. This is a good one to start with, as operands must be either JSON or JSONB, so all forms of this function are the same, just with different functions or casting of operands.

Before I begin, I’ll mention a post I saw on Michael Paquier’s excellent blog: Manipulating jsonb data by abusing of key uniqueness. In it, Michael uses the json_object_agg function to build up a JSON object from a query:

CREATE FUNCTION "json_append" (jsonb, jsonb) RETURNS jsonb AS $$

WITH json_union AS
(
  SELECT * FROM jsonb_each($1)
  UNION ALL
  SELECT * FROM jsonb_each($2)
)
SELECT json_object_agg(key, value) FROM json_union;

$$ LANGUAGE SQL;

This seems like a good idea, however it actually performs around two orders of magnitude slower than just iterating over the objects and building them up using string_agg and ||:

CREATE FUNCTION "json_concatenate" (jsonb, jsonb) RETURNS jsonb AS $$

SELECT ('{' || string_add(to_json("key")::text || ':' ||"value", ',') || '}')::jsonb
FROM (
  SELECT * FROM jsonb_each($1) UNION ALL SELECT * jsonb_each($2)
);

$$ LANGUAGE SQL;

CREATE OPERATOR || (
  LEFTARG = jsonb,
  RIGHTARG = jsonb,
  PROCEDURE = jsonb_concatenate
);

It seems that this is not just because of the Common Table Expression (although, using a CTE does make the second function perform just as poorly).

=# SELECT * FROM BENCHMARK(10000,
  'jsonb_concatenate(''{"a": 1, "b":2}''::jsonb, ''{"a":2}''::jsonb)',
  'jsonb_append(''{"a": 1, "b":2}''::jsonb, ''{"a":2}''::jsonb)'
  );

           code              |  runtime   | corrected
-----------------------------+------------+------------
 [Control]                   | 0.00550699 |          0
 jsonb_concatenate(...)      | 0.00652981 | 0.00102282
 jsonb_append(...)           |   0.484099 |   0.478592

My attempt at reimplementing the json_object_agg aggregate function in SQL proved even slower. Not at all surprising.

The next one we will tackle is the - operator from Hstore.

hstore - text     : delete key from left operand
hstore - text[]   : delete keys from left operand
hstore - hstore   : delete matching pairs from left operand

We can reimplement these for JSON: first as functions, and then create operators using those if we want. What is interesting is that we use the same construction pattern for our output JSONB object, however, I don’t seem to be able to figure out how to extract this out into another function.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION "jsonb_subtract"(
  "json" jsonb,
  "remove" TEXT
)
  RETURNS jsonb
  LANGUAGE sql
  IMMUTABLE
  STRICT
AS $function$
SELECT CASE WHEN "json" ? "remove" THEN COALESCE(
  (SELECT ('{' || string_agg(to_json("key")::text || ':' || "value", ',') || '}')
     FROM jsonb_each("json") -- Until this function is added!
    WHERE "key" <> "remove"),
  '{}'
)::jsonb
ELSE "json"
END
$function$;

CREATE OPERATOR - (
  LEFTARG = jsonb,
  RIGHTARG = text,
  PROCEDURE = jsonb_subtract
);

You’ll notice that there’s a test for if the key to remove is in the object first: this should be much faster in the situation where it doesn’t appear, as we then don’t need to recreate the object.

The other forms are quite similar, but the WHERE clause varies, and the initial test varies or is removed:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION "jsonb_subtract"(
  "json" jsonb,
  "keys" TEXT[]
)
  RETURNS jsonb
  LANGUAGE sql
  IMMUTABLE
  STRICT
AS $function$
SELECT CASE WHEN "json" ?| "keys" THEN COALESCE(
  (SELECT ('{' || string_agg(to_json("key")::text || ':' || "value", ',') || '}')
     FROM jsonb_each("json")
    WHERE "key" <> ALL ("keys")),
  '{}'
)::jsonb
ELSE "json"
END
$function$;

CREATE OPERATOR - (
  LEFTARG = jsonb,
  RIGHTARG = text[],
  PROCEDURE = jsonb_subtract
);

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION "jsonb_subtract"(
  "json" jsonb,
  "remove" jsonb
)
  RETURNS jsonb
  LANGUAGE sql
  IMMUTABLE
  STRICT
AS $function$
SELECT COALESCE(
  (
    SELECT ('{' || string_agg(to_json("key")::text || ':' || "value", ',') || '}')
    FROM jsonb_each("json")
    WHERE NOT
      ('{' || to_json("key")::text || ':' || "value" || '}')::jsonb <@ "remove"
      -- Note: updated using code from http://8kb.co.uk/blog/2015/01/16/wanting-for-a-hstore-style-delete-operator-in-jsonb/
  ),
  '{}'
)::jsonb
$function$;

CREATE OPERATOR - (
  LEFTARG = jsonb,
  RIGHTARG = jsonb,
  PROCEDURE = jsonb_subtract
);

There is also the #= operator for hstore: but this seems to be record #= hstore, rather than hstore #= hstore. I’m not sure how to implement this, but I can implement a jsonb #= jsonb function:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION "jsonb_update_only_if_present"(
  "json" jsonb,
  "other" jsonb
)
  RETURNS jsonb
  LANGUAGE sql
  IMMUTABLE
  STRICT
AS $function$

SELECT COALESCE(
  (SELECT ('{' || string_agg(to_json("key")::text || ':' || "value", ',') || '}')
     FROM (SELECT * FROM jsonb_each("json") UNION ALL SELECT * FROM jsonb_each("other")) AS a
     WHERE "json" ? "key"::text
  ),
  '{}'
)::jsonb
$function$;

CREATE OPERATOR #= (
  LEFTARG = jsonb,
  RIGHTARG = jsonb,
  PROCEDURE = jsonb_update_only_if_present
);

Finally, there are operators %% (convert to array of alternating key/value pairs), and %# (convert to 2-dimensional array of keys, values).

I haven’t figured out a way to create these yet either.

So, that’s what I’ve got so far. Obviously, these will be slower than pure C implementations however, we can run some benchmarks against the hstore operators for comparisons.

=# SELECT * FROM BENCHMARK(100000,
   ' ''{"a": 1, "b":2}''::jsonb || ''{"a":2}''::jsonb',
   ' ''a=>1, b=>2''::hstore || ''a=>2''::hstore'
   );
 

                     code                      |  runtime  |  corrected
-----------------------------------------------+-----------+-------------
 [Control]                                     | 0.0837061 |           0
  '{"a": 1, "b":2}'::jsonb || '{"a":2}'::jsonb | 0.0842681 | 0.000561953
  'a=>1, b=>2'::hstore || 'a=>2'::hstore       | 0.0843148 | 0.000608683
(3 rows)

Whoa. That’s actually pretty good!

And similar for subtract:

=# SELECT * FROM BENCHMARK(100000,
  ' ''{"a": 1, "b":2}''::jsonb - ''a''::text ',
  ' ''a=>1, b=>2''::hstore - ''a''::text '
);

                  code                  |  runtime  | corrected
----------------------------------------+-----------+------------
 [Control]                              | 0.0818689 |          0
  '{"a": 1, "b":2}'::jsonb - 'a'::text  |  0.083431 | 0.00156212
  'a=>1, b=>2'::hstore - 'a'::text      |  0.083159 | 0.00129008
(3 rows)

I might have to run these with some more complicated queries, and compare the results.