One of the secrets behind Autonomous JSON Database is a new optimized native binary storage format for JSON, called OSON. All JSON documents in Autonomous JSON Database are automatically stored in OSON format. This delivers big performance benefits to your JSON applications, including faster query performance, more efficient updates, and reduced storage sizes. This native JSON format is completely transparent to your applications; your application always uses standard JSON documents (e.g. text strings), but all database operations on JSON documents are optimized under the covers via this binary format.
OSON is based on a tree encoding. Following Figure shows OSON encoding of a simple JSON document as a serialized OSON byte array having tree pointers represented as jump navigation offsets.
Such encoding gives the following benefits when processing SQL/JSON path query and update.
There are even more benefits to OSON, which benefit other aspects of your JSON applications:
Leaf scalar Data in OSON uses native Oracle scalar data types (number, date, timestamp, binary float/double, year-month, day-time intervals, binary) and encoding formats. Consequently, there is no data-conversion required when extracting JSON leaf data as SQL scalar value in Autonomous JSON Database and its client drivers.
OSON processing is fully integrated into Oracle’s client drivers. JSON encoding into OSON and decoding from OSON can occur at the client side whenever appropriate and possible. This saves server CPU to encode JSON into OSON for ingest or to decode OSON into JSON for retrieval.Furthermore, Oracle client drivers are capable of directly leverage optimizations like ‘jump navigation’ over OSON format. SODA client driver for Autonomous JSON database uses OSON client side encoder and decoder autonomously.
OSON is fully and deeply integrated into all aspects of Oracle Autonomous Database: JSON functional index, JSON search index, JSON_TABLE() materialized views, JSON Data-Guide, parallel query processing, In-Memory columnar store, ExaData smart scan, have all been enhanced to fully take advantage of the OSON format to speed up SQL/JSON processing.
Finally, while OSON is available today in Autonomous JSON Database, Autonomous Transaction processing, Autonomous Data Warehouse, it will also soon be available as JSON datatype in all versions of Oracle Database. The preview version of Oracle Database 20c JSON datatype is available today. Oracle 21c Database JSON datatype information is available here .
You can learn more in our VLDB 2020 conference paper; the presentation's recording can be watched here:
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