Building a Poor Document Store inside PostgreSQL

Sat, 09 May 2026 22:00:00 +0530

The marketing for “schemaless” architecture was brilliant. It promised speed, agility, and a life free from the tyranny of ALTER TABLE migrations. When PostgreSQL introduced JSONB in version 9.4, many developers saw it as a green light to treat Postgres like MongoDB.

I’ve seen this pattern in dozens of codebases. It starts with a single metadata column, but within months, the entire business logic is buried inside a 2MB JSON blob.

Database-Internals on Lorbic

Building a Poor Document Store inside PostgreSQL