[dumdumchan]

> Experiments have been unable to find a binary encoding that is smaller or faster than a plain text encoding

Why does postgres do it then?

[kayodelycaon]

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-json.html

Long story short: json is a modified text field, jsonb is a specialized binary format that can be loaded without the overhead of parsing. Only jsonb supports indexing.