  When it comes to storing 3D city models in a database, the implementation of
the CityGML data model can be quite demanding and often results in complicated
schemas. As an example, 3DCityDB, a widely used solution, depends on a schema
having 66 tables, mapping closely the CityGML architecture. In this paper, we
propose an alternative (called cjdb) for storing CityGML models efficiently in
PostgreSQL with a much simpler table structure and data model design (only 3
tables are necessary). This is achieved by storing the attributes and
geometries of the objects directly in JSON. In the case of the geometries we
thus adopt the Simple Feature paradigm and we use the structure of CityJSON. We
compare our solution against 3DCityDB with large real-world 3D city models, and
we find that cjdb has significantly lower demands in storage space (around a
factor of 10), allows for faster import/export of data, and has a comparable
data retrieval speed with some queries being faster and some slower. The
accompanying software (importer and exporter) is available at
https://github.com/cityjson/cjdb/ under a permissive open-source license.
