Ugh another thing I really don't want in the database. Seriously, stuff like this will knacker your scalability over time.
I only say this because I've been there, with SQL Server's XML processing stuff, then spent nearly 2 years getting rid of it.
I only say this because I've been there, with SQL Server's XML processing stuff, then spent nearly 2 years getting rid of it.
For me, the native JSON support is a very handy tool to have in the toolbelt for parts of our application that have a very loose schema.
Logic suggests that you should keep as much processing functionality outside something which can't be scaled cheaply or easily and push it to cheaper front end servers.
On this basis, anything which implies more work than collecting and shifting the data over the wire shouldn't really be in the database. Parsing / processing JSON is one of those things that's going to eat CPU/memory.
Fundamentally there's nothing wrong with storing JSON inside the database and processing it externally, but processing it inside the database is a big risk.
I've seen the same thing over the years with XML in the database and more recently people adding CLR code to SQL Server stored procedures.
Sure, doing this hampers normalization and single server speed, but if the queries are parallelizable with shards et al, what would hamper scalability?