This is tangential to the discussion, but I've always felt that putting JSON into RDBMS is at best a kludge anyways - it's almost never in any normal form, and

This is tangential to the discussion, but I've always felt that putting JSON into RDBMS is at best a kludge anyways - it's almost never in any normal form, and also if you wanted schema-less objects, then you should use a DB system meant for it. I can appreciate that this is a strict and academic approach that will likely collide with a business' needs, though, and your point about indexing on arbitrary path searches is valid. > In MySQL, true and 1 evaluate as equal... Therefore MySQL does not truly support booleans. Also a fair point. I mostly am in the Python world, and often forget that truthiness is not the same as strict equality. > Since you mistook ranges for intervals, I HIGHLY recommend you take a closer look at ranges. I'll spend some time looking into this, thank you for the recommendation. > The list of things you can "work around" in with MySQL is long, but not everything can be "worked around" without reinventing the wheel. Also true. Much like my first point on JSON in RDBMS, there are often times where business needs make it such that you're going to be forced to work around problems, so it's easy to become accustomed to finding such hacks. Inertia is a hell of a thing. > Yes, I admit I hold grudges with regard to data integrity. A very reasonable thing to hold a grudge about. I still regard Xeons with deep suspicion due to AVX-512 forcing heavy throttling on all cores back in the day. I run them, mind you, but forever in the back of my mind I wonder, "is someone else on this multi-tenant node slowing my workloads down?"