I do not think that this is equivalent, it looks like querying complex JSON objects and not "simple" arrays. From the "Array Element by Position" example: d

I do not think that this is equivalent, it looks like querying complex JSON objects and not "simple" arrays. From the "Array Element by Position" example: db.blogposts.find( { "comments.0.by" : "Abe" } ) PostgreSQL doesn't have JSON support but it does have XML/Xpath support. If you stored XML documents in PostgreSQL the similar query to the MongoDB one would be something like this: select * from blogposts where (xpath('/comments[0]/@by', doc))::text[] = array['Abe'] Yes it's a little more verbose but not terrible so... at least in my opinion.