JSON datatype vs JSON-like STRING in BigQuery

Senior Data Engineer • Contractor / Freelancer • GCP & AWS Certified
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Senior Data Engineer • Contractor / Freelancer • GCP & AWS Certified
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Working with JSON in BigQuery — the native JSON datatype, extracting and transforming JSON data, LAX conversion functions, and handling semi-structured payloads.
Here's a mildly interesting function if you're working with JSON in BigQuery. JSON_TYPE takes in a JSON value and returns the name of the respective JSON type (object, array, string, number, boolean, null) as a STRING. See below an illustration of it...
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In one my previous posts, we've briefly introduced the JSON datatype in BigQuery.
But did anyone notice how most of the JSON functions have signatures for both a JSON-type input and a json-formatted string input?
What is the difference between the two?
Well, I like to call the json-formatted STRING a "json-like string" because while it might look like it, it's not necessarily valid JSON.
When you use, say, JSON_VALUE to query such a string, it does not validate it and reads it from the start until (and if) it finds the key matching your query. It does not care that you gave it invalid JSON.
In the example below, the json-formatted/json-like string is missing a closing bracket "}", but JSON_VALUE using it still manages to retrieve the 'key' since it never reaches the missing bracket .

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