Using JSON

While the relational model is extremely convenient and powerful, sometimes your data structures can be complex. You might want to store multiple values of different types in a single field, and you might want data to be keyed with labels rather than stored sequentially. These are common issues with transaction-level data, as well as alternative data. For example, a health care patient database may contain a field called prescription, which contains all the prescriptions of a patient. Some patients may not have any prescriptions; thus, this field may be empty. Other patients may have multiple prescriptions, and each patient’s prescription may be different from the others. One patient may have a hypertension drug of 10 mg per day. Another may have an insomnia medicine of two pills per night. Yet another patient may have both. It is very hard to store these in a predefined format, but they can usually be stored as key-value pairs using the JSON format. JSON represents...