It is hilarious to me when companies act like they've made some huge discovery that's been well-known to anyone working in DBs for the past decade, if not more.
JSON is slow as hell, both for serdes, and especially querying it. Use it sparingly, if at all. Normalization is not that hard, and it's trivial now with LLMs. Tell Claude you want your schema in BCNF, or 5NF if you're feeling froggy. Denormalize if and only if you have performance issues.
Not even companies. I've seen this with colleagues. They wanted JSON parsing in a moderately embedded device. No thank you. Parse it elsewhere, give me the binary result
The point they make is that user data is dynamic, meaning you can't just blindly normalize every json attribute into its own column. The challenge is determining which attributes deserve "shredding" and doing it automatically iiuc
> Rather than storing all attributes in a single JSON column, we automatically extract the most frequently accessed attributes into separate, strongly typed columns.
I'm glad they made the discovery but this is DB 101
JSON is slow as hell, both for serdes, and especially querying it. Use it sparingly, if at all. Normalization is not that hard, and it's trivial now with LLMs. Tell Claude you want your schema in BCNF, or 5NF if you're feeling froggy. Denormalize if and only if you have performance issues.
I'm glad they made the discovery but this is DB 101