There are some limitations in the db/sql package and how drivers implement it that make even packages like sqlx's MapScan have trouble returning postgres' rich datatypes. While the metadata is available via db/sql interfaces, pushing that up the stack hasn't widely happened (yet) AFAICT. pgx does offer the ability to get richer types out, but lacks the ability to return them in a map[string]interface{} or []map[string]interface{}. This package provides RowMap() and RowsMap() to do just that.