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MySQL and MariaDB are relational databases. As such, they are designed to work with data that follow a precise schema.
Recently they added a JSON data type, that allows to insert semi-structured data into a column.
The webinar took place on Monday, 6th April 2020, at 15:00 London time.
Webinar Recording
Topics index:
- 3:09 – About me
- 4:16 – JSON Support
- 10:32 – Use Cases
- 21:23 – Indexing Properties
- 29:30 – Indexing Arrays
- 34:13 – Relationships
- 36:02 – Validating JSON Documents
- 40:12 – Default Properties
- 43:14 –
JSON_ARRAYAGG()
,JSON_OBJECTAGG()
- 47:36 –
JSON_TABLE()
- 52:11 – MariaDB CONNECT
Slides
Errata and Notes
The following notes are based on feedback I had later, privately. Thank you to whoever gave me or will give me feedback. It could be used to farther expand these notes, making the webinar itself more useful.
- ERRATA: One of the slide erroneously mentions MySQL 7.0. Such version does not exist. The correct version is 5.7 – the version that preceded 8.0.
- I didn’t mention that currently adding and dropping a column can be “instantaneous”. This features have some limitations:
DROP COLUMN
does not free space, andADD COLUMNM
can only add a column at the end of a table (which is usually fine, but not always). - A strategy I didn’t mention to work to work with a heterogeneous catalogue is MariaDB Dynamic Columns. This feature was never popular, probably because it is non-standard and the syntax is very verbose.
- Another strategy that I didn’t mention is Table Inheritance. This PostgreSQL feature is particularly brilliant if a taxonomy has multiple levels (types and subtypes). However it is not standard and it has some disadvantages. I don’t think it is widely used.
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