In the last few years, JSON has been established as a standard format for data exchange among applications and services. XML is still the exchange standard (and will remain so), but many applications communicate by exchanging JSON data instead of XML documents. Therefore, the most important relational database management system products need to support JSON.
Two release cycles after the feature was requested by the community, Microsoft has implemented built-in JSON support in SQL Server 2016. The support is not as comprehensive as for XML, but for most databases and workloads, it will be quite fine.
This chapter explores how SQL Server stores and processes JSON data, with a comprehensive comparison between JSON ...
