Hstore Support

PG2 supports the official "hstore" extension which Postgres ships out from the box. The type hstore provides a set of text key/value pairs, for example:

foo => bar, baz => whatever

which maps to a Clojure map:

{:foo "bar", :baz "whatever"}

Why using hstore if there is json(b) which is much more powerful? Although hstore supports text values only, it's about 10% faster than jsonb. And sometimes, hstore is just enough.

Install the extension as follows:

create extension if not exists hstore;

Here is a beief demo of how to use this type:

(def conn (pg/connect ...))

(pg/execute conn "create temp table test (id int, hs hstore)")

(pg/execute conn
            "insert into test (id, hs) values ($1, $2), ($3, $4)"
            {:params [1 {:foo 1 :bar 2 :test "3"}
                      2 {"a" nil "c" "test"}]})

(def result
  (pg/execute conn "select * from test order by id"))

;; [{:id 1, :hs {:bar "2", :foo "1", :test "3"}}
;;  {:id 2, :hs {:c "test", :a nil}}]

If you COPY...FROM data into a table that has an hstore column, use type hint:

(def rows
  [[1 nil]
   [2 {}]
   [3 {nil 1 "" 2 "test" 3}]
   [4 {"foo" nil "bar" "" :baz 3}]
   [5 {1 "test" 'hey 2 :foo :bar}]
   [6 {:foo true :bar 'test :test/baz :lol/kek false "test"}]])

(pg/copy-in-rows conn
                 "copy foo (id, hs) from STDIN WITH (FORMAT CSV)"
                 rows
                 {:oids [pg.oid/int4 :hstore]})

This is because by default, a Clojure map is considered as a JSON value. See Type Hints (OIDs) for more info.

Hstore values are read to Clojure maps and vice versa. The hstore type allows keys to be empty strings but not null. Values can be null.

When encoding a Clojure map, the following rules apply for keys:

• if a key is null, it becomes an empty string to prevent an exception;
• keyword keys are written without a leading colon,
• for keywords and symbols, namespace is preserved;
• keys of other types are coerced to strings;
• during encoding, all keys are turned into keywords back.

Rules for values:

• keywords are written without a leading colon so you can safely transform them to keywords back;
• nil is written as a NULL literal;
• anything else is transformed to a string.

For details, read the official hstore documentation.