JSON is very helpful here, and it _happens_ [1] that our HTTP APIs tend to respond with JSON, but I feel SQL's data model is much better suited. The difference

JSON is very helpful here, and it _happens_ [1] that our HTTP APIs tend to respond with JSON, but I feel SQL's data model is much better suited. The difference is that JSON is hierarchical but SQL relations are flat. However if we let a relation be contained as a value (in a field/cell) then we should be able to produce our hierarchical query result in a natural way (and possibly map that through a `toJSON` method on the API server, if the client wants application/json... otherwise the server might want to do grpc or whatever and getting JSON from the DB is a roundabout pain in the bum). [1] Actually causality is backwards here - postgres supports JSON only because the Restful API servers that frequently interact with it need to provide JSON to _their_ clients... and so it was a highly demanded feature.