JSON’s popularity among developers has spawned a number of highly capable databases that are dedicated to the data format, including both SQL and NoSQL databases.
NoSQL document databases store data directly in JSON format without requiring additional processing. Popular NoSQL databases, such as MongoDB, Redis, and Couchbase also support nesting, object references, and arrays, which makes a JSON database easier to maintain. In recent years, these NoSQL databases have evolved to offer advantages such as flexible schemas and improved scaling and performance. With their support for flexible and dynamic data structures, these databases excel at storing semi-structured data, such as text documents, images, or social media feeds.
Widely used SQL databases, such as Oracle Database, now offer JSON as a data type, allowing developers to work with JSON without having to add a specialized JSON database into their projects. This gives dev teams the well-established benefits of SQL as well as the ability to work with other data types in a single database, including graph, spatial, REST, blockchain, and relational data.