This is wonderful work, and it is the foundation for yet more wonderful work in the future. However, as much as i am a huge PostgreSQL fanboy and a dedicated MongoDB peanut-thrower, i worry that the caption applied to this post is misleading.
Once this work is released, PostgreSQL will be faster than current versions of MongoDB at carrying out queries for documents which look for a given value at a given path (or perhaps more generally, values satisfying a given predicate at paths satisfying a given predicate).
But that has never been one of MongoDB's important strengths, has it? The operations for which MongoDB is optimised are inserting documents, retrieving document by ID, and conducting map-reduces across the whole database. Yes, it has the ability to query by values in leaves, and it can use indices to make that faster, but that's a bit of a second-tier, bag-on-the-side feature, isn't it? If that was the main thing you needed to do, you wouldn't have chosen MongoDB, right?
Once this work is released, PostgreSQL will be faster than current versions of MongoDB at carrying out queries for documents which look for a given value at a given path (or perhaps more generally, values satisfying a given predicate at paths satisfying a given predicate).
But that has never been one of MongoDB's important strengths, has it? The operations for which MongoDB is optimised are inserting documents, retrieving document by ID, and conducting map-reduces across the whole database. Yes, it has the ability to query by values in leaves, and it can use indices to make that faster, but that's a bit of a second-tier, bag-on-the-side feature, isn't it? If that was the main thing you needed to do, you wouldn't have chosen MongoDB, right?