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by mmsimanga 2744 days ago
I don't have any links to prove my point but I suspect we need to thank Mongo for pushing the traditional SQL databases to support JSON.
3 comments

I think the fact that the Cosmos DB "document db" API clones the MongoDB API, of all the available options, is a link in that chain.
Why? Seriously, JSON is lame, it's an idiotic trend, a fashion from the UI that's infected the back end for no gain whatsoever for anyone not using JavaScript. XML is better and we've just watch JSON slowly reinvent everything XML already had.
I think he meant json as a data model, ie nested objects, arrays and PODs, rather than json as a textual representation..
FWIW and insofar as I can recollect, JSON was supported by Postgres before Mongo was a thing, and Mongo was built based on Postgres.
No, that's not correct: Initial json support in PG was added in early 2012 https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit... whereas mongodb was made public in 2009, according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB

I don't see how Mongo was built based on Postgres, either?

My guess is the grandparent is (mis-)remembering the kerfuffle[0] around mongo shipping a copy of PG as a "BI Connector". But yeah, the timeline is off, that was in 2015.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10697692

Actually, no. I'm remembering asking myself how Mongo worked back when it launched, and reading somewhere that it was a heavily modded Postgres under the hood (like Amazon Redshift, which makes no secret about it, since).

I might be misremembering, though. And there's a possibility that what I read then was inaccurate.

I might admittedly be remembering this wrong, but I seem to recollect that Postgres had a couple of (unofficial) contrib modules to support JSON back in 2008 or so, and that (unfortunately buried in Postgres vs Mongo articles) the initial release of Mongo was actually a fork of Postgres for all practical intents.

The relevant data structures and indexing mechanisms (hstore, tsvector, gin, gist) were all available -- if only experimentally -- before Mongo launched.