Tag: JSON

Video : JSON Data Guide

Today’s video is an overview of the JSON Data Guide functionality introduced in Oracle 12.2.

If videos aren’t your thing, you can read the articles instead. This video focuses on the main features that were introduced in 12.2, but there are some nice additions in 18c also.

The cameo in today’s video is Toon Koppelaars of #SMartDB fame.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

PL/SQL Objects for JSON in Oracle 12cR2

I’ve been playing around with some more of the new JSON features in Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2).

The first thing I tried was the new PL/SQL support for the JSON functions and conditions that were introduced for SQL in 12.1. That was all pretty obvious.

Next I moved on to the new PL/SQL objects for JSON. These are essentially a replacement for APEX_JSON as far as generation and parsing of JSON data are concerned. If I’m honest I was kind-of confused by this stuff at first for a couple of reasons.

  • If you are coming to it with an APEX_JSON mindset it’s easy to miss the point. Once you “empty your cup” it’s pretty straight forward.
  • The documentation is pretty terrible at the moment. There are lots of mistakes. I tweeted about this the other day and some folks from the Oracle documentation team got back to me about it. I gave them some examples of the problems, so hopefully it will get cleaned up soon!

I was originally intending to write a single article covering both these JSON new features, but it got clumsy, so I separated them.

The second one isn’t much more than a glorified links page at the moment, but as I cover the remaining functionality it will either expand or contain more links depending on the nature of the new material. Big stuff will go in a separate article. Small stuff will be included in this one.

I also added a new section to this recent ORDS article, giving an example of handling the JSON payload using the new object types.

I’ve only scratched the surface of this stuff, so I’ll probably revisit the articles several times as I become more confident with it.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Remember, you can practice a lot of this 12.2 stuff for free at https://livesql.oracle.com .

Video : Indexing JSON Data in Oracle Database 12c

Following on from last week’s post, today’s video is about indexing JSON data in Oracle Database 12c.

If videos aren’t your thing, you might want to read these articles, which the videos are based on.

The cameo in this video comes courtesy of Bertrand Drouvot, who was a silent extra in the previous video too. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Video : JSON Support in Oracle Database 12c

Today’s video is a sprint through some of the JSON support in Oracle Database 12c.

If videos aren’t your thing, you might want to read these instead.

The cameo in this video comes courtesy of Yves Colin, who I’ll see again in a couple of weeks at the Paris Province Oracle Meetup. A couple of extras (Bertrand Drouvot and Osama Mustafa) wanted to get in on the act too. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Playing around with JSON using the APEX_JSON package

hockey-149683_640We publish a number of XML web services from the database using the PL/SQL web toolkit, as described here. In more recent times we’ve had a number of requirements for JSON web services, so we did what most people probably do and Googled for “json pl/sql” and got a link to PL/JSON.

I know about the support for JSON in 12c, but we are not on 12c for these projects and that’s more about consuming JSON, rather than publishing it.

People seemed reasonably happy with PL/JSON, so I thought no more about it. At the weekend, kind-of by accident, I came across the APEX_JSON package that comes as part of APEX 5 and thought, how could I have missed that?

This is not a slight against PL/JSON, but given the choice of using something built and supported by Oracle, that is already in the database (we have APEX 5 in most databases already) or loading something else, I tend to pick the Oracle method. Since then I’ve been having a play with APEX_JSON and I quite like it. Here’s what I wrote while I was playing with it.

If you have done anything with XML in PL/SQL, you should find it pretty simple.

I’m guessing this post will result in a few people saying, “What about ORDS?” Yes I know. Because of history we are still mostly using mod_plsql and OHS, but ORDS is on the horizon. Even so, we will probably continue to use APEX_JSON to do the donkey-work, and just use ORDS to front it.

Cheers

Tim…

JSON Support in Oracle Database 12c (12.1.0.2)

I spent a bit of time at OpenWorld looking at the JSON support in Oracle Database 12c. I started to write some stuff about it on the plane home and I spent the last two mornings finishing it off. You can see the results here.

I’ve tried to keep it light, since the documentation does a pretty good job at explaining all the variations of the syntax. I’ve also avoided trying to teach people about JSON itself. There is loads of stuff about that on the net already.

For the most part I think the JSON support looks pretty cool. During the process of writing the articles I did notice a few of things that I thought might confuse.

  • Using dot notation to access JSON in SQL seems like a neat solution, but each reference results in a query transformation that may well leave you with a whole bunch of function calls littered around your SQL. The end result is probably not what you want. I think it is probably better to avoid it and write all the direct function calls yourself, so you know exactly what the optimizer will do.
  • Typically the query transformations of dot notation result in a JSON_QUERY function call, but the optimizer can substitute a JSON_VALUE call if there is an index that it can take advantage of. That can be a little confusing when you aren’t expecting it. Once again, it might be better to avoid dot notation so as not to confuse.
  • If you are careful, the indexing of JSON data is pretty straight forward, but if you aren’t aware of how the query transformations work or you forget how very small changes in function parameters affect index usage, you can chase your tail trying to figure out why you aren’t able to use your indexes.

Until the REST APIs are released, the only way you can use this stuff is from the server side, so it’s not really something you can hand out to developers who are expecting to use just another document store. I had a play with the REST stuff during a hands-on lab at OpenWorld and it looked kind-of cool. When it’s released I’ll write an article about it and run it by some of the folks at work to see how they think it compares to other document databases…

Cheers

Tim…