JSON on the database? No thanks!

JSON is a wonderful thing for developers. It’s becoming more and more the de facto standard for information interchange and asynchronous operations inside applications. So much so that database engines are integrating it on their latest release. Examples of that are:

• MySQL 5.7: The JSON datatype
  
• 
  
  Microsoft SQL Server 2016: JSON Data
  

I wont even challenge the advantages and performance measurements on such primitives, but both from a database administrator perspective, as well as a developer’s one, I think this is a bad idea!

The major pitfalls on using this native integration would be:

1. Injecting database vendor dependency on the application, since these enhancements work on specific primitives not part of SQL;
   
2. Processing expense and memory allocation is shifted on to the database server, whose main role should be serving data not formatting or performing interpretations from it.

So you might end up with a great application that uses the most recent features from your specific RDBMS but from then on you are stuck with it and hope you don’t forget to perform the server sizing including the JSON processing load.