How to convert result table to JSON array in MySQL

Question

I'd like to convert result table to JSON array in MySQL using preferably only plain MySQL commands. For example with query

SELECT name, phone FROM person;

| name | phone |
| Jack | 12345 |
| John | 23455 |

the expected JSON output would be

[
  {
    "name": "Jack",
    "phone": 12345
  },
  {
    "name": "John",
    "phone": 23455
  }
]

Is there way to do that in plain MySQL?

EDIT:

There are some answers how to do this with e.g. MySQL and PHP, but I couldn't find pure MySQL solution.

Answer 1

New solution:

Built using Your great comments, thanks!

SELECT JSON_ARRAYAGG(JSON_OBJECT('name', name, 'phone', phone)) from Person;

---

Old solution:

With help from @Schwern I managed to put up this query, which seems to work!

SELECT CONCAT(
    '[', 
    GROUP_CONCAT(JSON_OBJECT('name', name, 'phone', phone)),
    ']'
) 
FROM person;

Answer 2

You can use json_object to get rows as JSON objects.

SELECT json_object('name', name, 'phone', phone)
FROM person;

This won't put them in an array, or put commas between them. You'll have to do that in the code which is fetching them.

Answer 3

If you're running your queries in console (as you say in one of the comments) then install MySql Shell and you'll be able to output queries' results as json.

Answer 4

There are two "group by" functions for JSON called json_arrayagg, json_objectagg.

This problem can be solved with:

SELECT json_arrayagg( json_merge( json_object('name', name), json_object('phone', phone) ) ) FROM person;

This requires MySQL 5.7+.