New JSON support coming in the next SQL Server version “2016”

The next SQL Server version, named "2016" will contain interesting new features to all "web people": it contains built-in JSON support. Cool!

But what does this JSON support actually mean? There's a great blog post on this topic, and suggest reading through it. At this writing, SQL Server can return query results directly in JSON format, using the new "FOR JSON" query specifier. The next release, CTP 3 (we are currently at CTP 2.x), will further expand this support, and will allow you to load table data from a JSON string.

Previously, SQL Server had similar features for the XML datatype. This feature set was very useful if you worked with lots of XML data. For instance, SQL Server could index your XML based data using XML indexes directly. With the forthcoming JSON support, I'm looking for similar set of features. At this point, the direction is right, but work still remains.

Remember, that you can download the latest CTP versions from MSDN. In previous SQL Server previews/betas, the pace at which new versions came available was slower. This time around, there have been many small incremental updates, so watch your MSDN downloads often.

Happy data processing!