Native JSON support in MYSQL 5.7 : what are the pros and cons of JSON data type in MYSQL?

Question

In MySQL 5.7 a new data type for storing JSON data in MySQL tables has been added. It will obviously be a great change in MySQL. They listed some benefits

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Answer 1

The following from MySQL 5.7 brings sexy back with JSON sounds good to me:

Using the JSON Data Type in MySQL comes with two advantages over storing JSON strings in a text field:

Data validation. JSON documents will be automatically validated and invalid documents will produce an error. Improved internal storage format. The JSON data is converted to a format that allows quick read access to the data in a structured format. The server is able to lookup subobjects or nested values by key or index, allowing added flexibility and performance.

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Specialised flavours of NoSQL stores (Document DBs, Key-value stores and Graph DBs) are probably better options for their specific use cases, but the addition of this datatype might allow you to reduce complexity of your technology stack. The price is coupling to MySQL (or compatible) databases. But that is a non-issue for many users.

Note the language about document validation as it is an important factor. I guess a battery of tests need to be performed for comparisons of the two approaches. Those two being:

1. Mysql with JSON datatypes
2. Mysql without

The net has but shallow slideshares as of now on the topic of mysql / json / performance from what I am seeing.

Perhaps your post can be a hub for it. Or perhaps performance is an after thought, not sure, and you are just excited to not create a bunch of tables.