• CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    JSON data within a database is perfectly fine and has completely justified use cases. JSON is just a way to structure data. If it’s bespoke data or something that doesn’t need to be structured in a table, a JSON string can keep all that organized.

    We use it for intake questionnaire data. It’s something that needs to be on file for record purposes, but it doesn’t need to be queried aside from simply being loaded with the rest of the record.

    Edit: and just to add, even MS SQL/Azure SQL has the ability to both query and even index within a JSON object. Of course Postgres’ JSONB data type is far better suited for that.

    • TechNom (nobody)@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      While I understand your point, there’s a mistake that I see far too often in the industry. Using Relational DBs where the data model is better suited to other sorts of DBs. For example, JSON documents are better stored in document DBs like mongo. I realize that your use case doesn’t involve querying json - in which it can be simply stored as text. Similar mistakes are made for time series data, key-value data and directory type data.

      I’m not particularly angry at such (ab)uses of RDB. But you’ll probably get better results with NoSQL DBs. Even in cases that involve multiple data models, you could combine multiple DB software to achieve the best results. Or even better, there are adaptors for RDBMS that make it behave like different types at the same time. For example, ferretdb makes it behave like mongodb, postgis for geographic db, etc.