A PostgreSQL-specific alternative might be to write triggers in one of the provided procedural languages to turn your JSON into something indexed or materialized elsewhere.
Do either of those work for you?
Also, purely out of curiosity, do you have a design reason for only wanting to store schema-less JSON, or have you just been burned by slow database migrations in the past?
There seems to be a big community of people who really want to reject schema and use JSON for everything, and I'm really curious if they (a) don't understand relational databases, (b) are getting some surprising productivity gains somehow, (c) have been burned by slow database migrations in the past, or (d) some other reason.
All of the above would work, but feels less than ideal. I'm pretty comfortable using a well-schema'd relational database to manage data, but I don't think it fits something I'm working on atm.
I'm collecting and parsing data from a few different types of sources (think: some web page scrapers, Twitter, RSS feeds) for later analysis. I want an intermediate data store where I can throw all of the data together for querying in the short term (within days).
Some of the features I extract from it will probably be stored for longer-term use in a regular database. The JSON itself I expect won't ever be referred to in the long term.
If I can think of a new piece of data I might want to look at, it's very appealing to be able to just print it out in one of the data-gathering programs, without having to touch the entire stack top-to-bottom, deploy a new schema, etc.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496946
A PostgreSQL-specific alternative might be to write triggers in one of the provided procedural languages to turn your JSON into something indexed or materialized elsewhere.
Do either of those work for you?
Also, purely out of curiosity, do you have a design reason for only wanting to store schema-less JSON, or have you just been burned by slow database migrations in the past?
There seems to be a big community of people who really want to reject schema and use JSON for everything, and I'm really curious if they (a) don't understand relational databases, (b) are getting some surprising productivity gains somehow, (c) have been burned by slow database migrations in the past, or (d) some other reason.