> Why is storing json in a database important to you? I don't need JSON per se, I want to store data with a predefined, recursive format which most of the time

> Why is storing json in a database important to you? I don't need JSON per se, I want to store data with a predefined, recursive format which most of the time will be just serialized / deserialized but occasionally also queried without having any idea ahead of the time what the query will be. For all I care, it could be Python pickle, PHP serialize, XML or whatever ungodly format you want as long as the above stands. (XML actually works in MySQL thanks to ExtractValue and UpdateXML but alas, I break out in rashes when I touch XML :P) Let's say you want to display a page of text and images. (Doh.) But you want to give your authors great flexibility and yet nice styling so you give them components: a rolodex, a two-by-two grid, tab groups and so forth (we have 44 such components). This stuff is recursive, obviously. Are you going to normalize this? It's doable but a world of pain is an accurate description for the results. The data you get back from deserializing JSON should map pretty well to the templating engine. Rarely you want to query and update things, some analytics, some restructuring etc. If it were just a key-value store with page id and serialized data the only way to do maintenance would be to deserialize each page and manually dig in. Sure, it's doable but having the database do that is simply convenient. That's the reason we use database engines, right? At the end of the day, you don't need SQL, you can just iterate a K-V store and manually filter in the application in whatever ways you want -- it's just more convenient to have the engine do so. Same here. The nicest thing here is that if someone wants ongoing analytics you actually can add an index on a particular piece in the blob and go to town.