I doubt querying JSON or XML or some other embedded structured format would be faster than querying normalized data. It might be true in some special cases, but

I doubt querying JSON or XML or some other embedded structured format would be faster than querying normalized data. It might be true in some special cases, but certainly not in the general case of ad-hoc queries across nested data structures. But I totally agree SQL could be improved to make normalization feel like less of a burden. It really highlights a problem when it feels like its more convenient to just dump a JSON array into a field rather than extract to a separate table.