I did a bit of digging because I was curious to the answer for this question. My understanding is that the closest thing MariaDB has currently is dynamic column

I did a bit of digging because I was curious to the answer for this question. My understanding is that the closest thing MariaDB has currently is dynamic columns[0]. Essentially they allow you to have arbitrary key-value pairs associated with each row in a table. According to a talk from a couple years ago[1], it seems like the plan is to use this as a stepping stone toward JSON support. Note that MariaDB also supports virtual columns[2] which could be used to create indexes over dynamic columns. [0] https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/dynamic-columns/ https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/dynamic-columns/ [1] http://www.slideshare.net/blueskarlsson/using-json-with-mariadb-and-mysql http://www.slideshare.net/blueskarlsson/using-json-with-mari... [2] https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/virtual-computed-columns/ https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/virtual-computed-columns/