I'm not sure there's a better option in Postgres, and I'm not convinced you understand his main argument. How would you restate it?

You're not sure there's a better option than JSONifying a bunch of correlated subqueries individually?

That's right: I'm not sure there's a better option in Postgres than JSONifying a bunch of correlated subqueries individually. How would you do it?

It's kind of a red flag, though, that you didn't answer my question about how you would restate his main argument. It suggests to me that you're just here to flame instead of to have a productive discussion.

I already said I don't have time to rewrite the query right now, but I'd definitely get rid of the correlated subqueries, which should be obvious from my comments. I may or may not use an intermediate representation, like a CTE, and I'd probably make use of JSONB_OBJECT_AGG.

I kind of thought it was a red flag that you were accusing me of not understanding the post, which is about how SQL is bad at hierarchical data, while defending the bad SQL he used to defend his argument. But I didn't make a big deal out of it.

I think that poster is asking you to answer this question:

> I'm not sure there's a better option in Postgres, and I'm not convinced you understand his main argument. How would you restate it?

Rather than asking you to demonstrate the better way of writing the query.

I know. I answered that in my second paragraph. They also asked how I'd approach writing the query after I already mentioned the issues and sent them the postgres doc page.

You would restate his main argument as "I kind of thought it was a red flag that you were accusing me of not understanding the post, which is about how SQL is bad at hierarchical data, while defending the bad SQL he used to defend his argument. But I didn't make a big deal out of it."? That doesn't make any sense.

I think you don't understand what the post is about, you don't understand what the query is trying to achieve, you don't know a better way to do it, and you're just engaging in ego defense instead of contributing anything.

No, that's not how I would restate it. I said I addressed it in there, not that the entire paragraph addresses it. Reading comprehension.

You didn't answer my question in there, no.

Seems to me, from the bit you quoted, that their answer would be something along the lines of: "I would restate the point of the post as talking about how SQL is bad at hierarchical data, while using bad SQL to defend this argument." What they actually wrote is so close to this that your claim not to be able to see that feels a tad disingenious.