How to perform update operations on columns of type JSONB in Postgres 9.4

Question

Looking through the documentation for the Postgres 9.4 datatype JSONB, it is not immediately obvious to me how to do updates on JSONB columns.

Documentation for JSONB types and functions:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/functions-json.html http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/datatype-json.html

As an examples, I have this basic table structure:

CREATE TABLE test(id serial, data jsonb);

Inserting is easy, as in:

INSERT INTO test(data) values ('{"name": "my-name", "tags": ["tag1", "tag2"]}');

Now, how would I update the 'data' column? This is invalid syntax:

UPDATE test SET data->'name' = 'my-other-name' WHERE id = 1;

Is this documented somewhere obvious that I missed? Thanks.

Answer 1

If you're able to upgrade to Postgresql 9.5, the jsonb_set command is available, as others have mentioned.

In each of the following SQL statements, I've omitted the where clause for brevity; obviously, you'd want to add that back.

Update name:

UPDATE test SET data = jsonb_set(data, '{name}', '"my-other-name"');

Replace the tags (as oppose to adding or removing tags):

UPDATE test SET data = jsonb_set(data, '{tags}', '["tag3", "tag4"]');

Replacing the second tag (0-indexed):

UPDATE test SET data = jsonb_set(data, '{tags,1}', '"tag5"');

Append a tag (this will work as long as there are fewer than 999 tags; changing argument 999 to 1000 or above generates an error. This no longer appears to be the case in Postgres 9.5.3; a much larger index can be used):

UPDATE test SET data = jsonb_set(data, '{tags,999999999}', '"tag6"', true);

Remove the last tag:

UPDATE test SET data = data #- '{tags,-1}'

Complex update (delete the last tag, insert a new tag, and change the name):

UPDATE test SET data = jsonb_set(
    jsonb_set(data #- '{tags,-1}', '{tags,999999999}', '"tag3"', true), 
    '{name}', '"my-other-name"');

It's important to note that in each of these examples, you're not actually updating a single field of the JSON data. Instead, you're creating a temporary, modified version of the data, and assigning that modified version back to the column. In practice, the result should be the same, but keeping this in mind should make complex updates, like the last example, more understandable.

In the complex example, there are three transformations and three temporary versions: First, the last tag is removed. Then, that version is transformed by adding a new tag. Next, the second version is transformed by changing the name field. The value in the data column is replaced with the final version.