[dogline]

Until just now, I've been trying to figure out why people think that JSON is necessary in the database? Yes, lots of data is hierarchical, and you just normalize it into tables and move on. The fact that some people don't work this way, and would like to put this data as it stands into a JSON tree hadn't occurred to me.

What problem does normalization solve? You don't have to parse and run through a tree every time you're looking for data. You would, however, need to rebuild the tree through self joins or other references in other cases, I suppose. It depends how far you break down your data. I understand that we all see data structures a bit differently, however.