It seems like you're talking about a couple of different cases here. If you're going to be incrementing a field infrequently, then just resaving the JSONB shou

It seems like you're talking about a couple of different cases here. If you're going to be incrementing a field infrequently, then just resaving the JSONB shouldn't be a big deal. If you're updating a field frequently, having it in it's own column makes more sense and should absolutely be worth the time. It's tremendously more efficient to increment a typed number than it is to increment a piece of a serialized chunk of JSON. When you create a column with postgres that has a null default, it doesn't allocate space for it. It's one of the things that makes postgres so good for huge databases because adding an empty column is an instantaneous operation, rather than a locking operation. On the flip side, when you create a field in JSON you're duplicating the space used just to name the field in every single row. But the short version is, if you're updating something often enough that you're willing to fight around upserting into a JSON column rather that just creating that same column it might be worth it to take a step back and re-evaluate why doing it that way is important to you.