JSON

JSON is a first-class column. The stored form is binary NSJB, not UTF-8 text. Insert a JSON string; the engine parses it.

CREATE TABLE products (
    id       UUID PRIMARY KEY DEFAULT UUID(),
    name     STRING NOT NULL,
    metadata JSON
);

INSERT INTO products (name, metadata) VALUES
    ('alpha', '{"category":"electronics","n":1}'),
    ('beta',  '{"category":"books","n":2}');

CREATE INDEX category_index ON products (metadata.category);

SELECT name FROM products WHERE metadata.category = 'electronics';
SELECT metadata.category FROM products WHERE name = 'alpha';

Path extract

column.part.part. A numeric part indexes an array (tags.0). A missing path is SQL NULL. Scalars become STRING, BOOL, or DECIMAL; nested objects and arrays stay JSON.

Equality, range, BETWEEN, and IS NULL on a path index are sargable. EXPLAIN shows IndexScan … json.

Limits

These fail closed:

JSON cannot be a foreign-key column. Path indexes cannot be UNIQUE full-text or vector indexes.

See also the engine note `docs/json.md` in the repository.