I recently wanted to ingest a line-delimited JSON file into Postgres for some quick data exploration. I was surprised when I couldn't find a simple CLI solution that parsed the JSON and loaded each field into its own column. Every approach I found instead inserted the entire JSON object in a JSONB field. Here is my solution.

Postgres introduced the JSONB type in version 9.4 with considerable excitement. JSONB promised to marry a favorite relational database with the noSQL world, permitting data to be stored in the database as JSON without the need for re-parsing whenever a field is accessed. Moreover, the binary storage format permits indexing and complex queries against the stored JSON blobs. This data format embodies the flexible schema and was readily adopted at Fraight.