Book Image

SQL Server 2016 Developer's Guide

By : Miloš Radivojević, Dejan Sarka, William Durkin
Book Image

SQL Server 2016 Developer's Guide

By: Miloš Radivojević, Dejan Sarka, William Durkin

Overview of this book

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 is considered the biggest leap in the data platform history of the Microsoft, in the ongoing era of Big Data and data science. This book introduces you to the new features of SQL Server 2016 that will open a completely new set of possibilities for you as a developer. It prepares you for the more advanced topics by starting with a quick introduction to SQL Server 2016's new features and a recapitulation of the possibilities you may have already explored with previous versions of SQL Server. The next part introduces you to small delights in the Transact-SQL language and then switches to a completely new technology inside SQL Server - JSON support. We also take a look at the Stretch database, security enhancements, and temporal tables. The last chapters concentrate on implementing advanced topics, including Query Store, column store indexes, and In-Memory OLTP. You will finally be introduced to R and learn how to use the R language with Transact-SQL for data exploration and analysis. By the end of this book, you will have the required information to design efficient, high-performance database applications without any hassle.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
SQL Server 2016 Developer's Guide
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
12
In-Memory OLTP Improvements in SQL Server 2016

Converting JSON data in a tabular format


Nowadays, JSON is a recognized format for data representation and exchange. However, most of the existing data still resides in relational databases and you need to combine them to process and manipulate them together. In order to combine JSON with relational data or to import it in relational tables, you need to map JSON data to tabular data, that is, convert it into a tabular format. In SQL Server 2016, you can use the OPENJSON function to accomplish this.

  • OPENJSON is a newly added rowset function. A rowset function is a table-valued function and returns an object that can be used as if it were a table or a view. Just as OPENXML provides a rowset view over an XML document, OPENJSON gives a rowset over JSON data. The OPENJSON function converts JSON objects and properties to table rows and columns respectively.

  • It accepts two input arguments:

    • Expression: JSON text in the Unicode format.

    • Path: This is an optional argument. It is a JSON path expression...