Summary for JSON and XML

JSON and XML have gained widespread adoption throughout various technologies, including markup languages like HTML, document-oriented databases such as MongoDB, and data exchange formats for APIs like JSON-RPC. Even renowned relational database management systems have inevitably incorporated JSON and XML into their ecosystem.

JSON is one of the most popular data interchange formats in the modern software industry. It is a lightweight, open-source, and human-readable file format widely used for transmitting and exchanging data between servers and web services.

XML is a format used for encoding human- and machine-readable documents. Like HTML, XML is a markup language that enables the storage and transmission of arbitrary data. Due to that versatility, XML has become a popular choice for data exchange over the internet, with applications ranging from RSS feeds to the OpenDocument Format to the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.

Importing data

While we could store JSON documents as strings using the TEXT data type, JSON provides two crucial advantages. Firstly, storing JSON documents in a column of type JSON automatically validates the input and produces an error for invalid documents. Secondly, valid JSON documents stored in a column of type JSON are converted to a binary format, facilitating short loading times and efficient access to sub-objects of the document. With that, we can import a JSON document into a table as follows: