Working with JSON Data

Not all data fits neatly into rows and columns. Track metadata like BPM, musical key, and mood tags varies from track to track. Device information for a stream event might include an OS version one day and a screen resolution the next.

Storing this kind of flexible, nested data in separate normalized tables creates a sprawl of one-to-many relationships for fields that are rarely queried on their own. JSON columns offer a middle ground: keep the structured parts of your schema relational, and store the flexible parts as JSON within a single column.