What does "H" in "HStore" mean in PostgresDB data type name?

Question

I tried searching and after some search here I decided to reveal this secret with YOUR help.

Answer 1

You can safely bet that hstore is a diminutive for hash-store, hash being a reference to the Perl datatype for key/value pairs.

Oleg Bartunov, co-designer of this datatype, mentions the relationship in the -hackers mailing-list:

have you seen contrib/hstore ? It's perl-like hash data type

Also in the original doc, before the adoption of hstore in the contrib section of PostgreSQL (this page dates back from 2003 or older): http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/hstore/README.hstore there are several references to Perl hashes to explain some operators:

* hstore ? text - get value , perl analogy $h{key}
* hstore || hstore - concatenation, perl analogy %a=( %b, %c );