Note: Here, we are defining JSON in the context of a distributed database.
JSON, or Javascript Object Notation, is a way of formatting “semi-structured” data, and CockroachDB supports it by default. A small amount of data in CockroachDB is typically JSON data.
To understand what JSON is, follow this example: Imagine a table that stores information about blog posts. Much of the data is structured; every blog post needs data on title, author, and number of words (and these become the columns in the table). But there might be additional data that’s not applicable to every post, such as if a user comments on a post or likes a post. Instead of having to make a separate column for each of these data pieces (which would be inefficient since many of the cells would be empty), you can make a single column that supports JSON – and then you format the unique data pieces in JSON and put any item at all into that column, without having a predefined label attached to it.