OPENJSON : Getting to the data, and the PATH – PART II

We’ve looked at getting pulling data from a JSON document into relational table format using an explicit schema that was defined in the WITH clause of the OPENJSON table valued fumction.

However, in that example, we used a PATH expression that was taken from the root of the JSON document.

A question that I recently had was ‘What of you want to take the PATH from a certain point in the JSON document’ – and that’s what we will look at here.

We use this simple document, which contains one object

{
    "Configuration Property": {
      "Configuration name": "recovery interval (min)",
      "Value": 0,
      "minimum": 0,
      "maximum": 32767,
      "value_in_use": 0,
      "description": "Maximum recovery interval in minutes",
      "is_dynamic": true,
      "is_advanced": true
    }
}

Here, we want to start retrieving data from the document starting at the path

$." "Configuration Property"

All we need to do is define the base PATH (the starting point) in our OPENJSON query.

DECLARE @json NVARCHAR(MAX) =
N'
{
    "Configuration Property": {
      "Configuration name": "recovery interval (min)",
      "Value": 0,
      "minimum": 0,
      "maximum": 32767,
      "value_in_use": 0,
      "description": "Maximum recovery interval in minutes",
      "is_dynamic": true,
      "is_advanced": true
    }
}
';
SELECT 
 [Configuration name] 
,[Value]
,[minimum]  
,[maximum]
,[value_in_use]
,[description]
,[is_dynamic]
,[is_advanced] 
FROM  
     OPENJSON(@json, '$."Configuration Property"')  
WITH 
( 
     [Configuration name] NVARCHAR(35) 
    ,[Value]              NVARCHAR(100)   
    ,[minimum]            NVARCHAR(100)  
    ,[maximum]            NVARCHAR(100)  
    ,[value_in_use]       NVARCHAR(100) 
    ,[description]        NVARCHAR(100)
    ,[is_dynamic]         BIT
    ,[is_advanced]        BIT
);

I hope this has helped on your SQL Server JSON journey. We’ll see more real soon.

Have a great day

Cheers

Marty