Dino Esposito explains JSON-to-rowset native support in SQL Server 2016 and provides a realistic perspective of data query when you have JSON data stored in the database.

A new SQL Server 2025 feature lets organizations run vector-based semantic searches on their own data, connecting to local or cloud-hosted AI models without relying on massive general-purpose LLMs.

With SQL Server 2016, it now makes sense to store JSON objects in your database (even though there’s no JSON datatype). Here’s how to query JSON properties to find the rows you want.