PostgreSQL JSONB Indexing for Multi-Tenant AI Feature Metadata: Querying 100K Feature Configs Without Full Table Scans

PostgreSQL JSONB Indexing for Multi-Tenant AI Feature Metadata: Querying 100K Feature Configs Without Full Table Scans

When you're building a SaaS with AI features, you face a brutal choice: normalize everything into relational tables and spend your weeks writing migrations, or throw it all into a settings TEXT column and query like you're grep-ing production logs.

I've done both. The migrations nearly killed me. The grep approach nearly killed performance.

There's a third way: JSONB with GIN indexes. It's how CitizenApp stores heterogeneous feature configurations—prompts, temperature settings, usage limits, custom parameters—for each tenant, without schema sprawl or full table scans. And it actually performs.

Why JSONB Instead of Normalized Tables