> The VARIANT type shipped in DuckDB v1.5, and the way to think about it is JSON on steroids. Basically, imagine if JSON were fast. [...] DuckDB automatically detects the common structure hidden in your semi-structured data and “shreds” it, so it compresses well in storage

I am really looking forward to this hitting v2.0. I can't stand uncompressed JSON - so space-inefficient. But heterogenous JSON in parquet files is such a pain because of schema differences causing fields to be silently dropped. Having DuckDB solve this is exactly what I've been looking for.