Umchandar Jayachandran has an announcement:
Today, we are announcing the public preview of JSON enhancements in Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2022 CTP 2.0. This preview contains an enhancement to ISJSON function and three new JSON functions – JSON_PATH_EXISTS, JSON_OBJECT and JSON_ARRAY. Currently, the ISJSON function allows you to test if a string value contains a valid JSON object or array. The new optional json_type_constraint parameter in ISJSON function can now be used to test conformance of JSON documents to the IETF RFC 8259 specification. This capability allows you to test for strings that contain a JSON value, scalar, object, or array. This functionality is like the IS JSON predicate in the ANSI SQL standard. The new JSON_PATH_EXISTS function allows you to test for the existence of a specific SQL/JSON path expression in a JSON document. This functionality is like the JSON_EXISTS predicate in the ANSI SQL standard. The new ANSI SQL compatible JSON value constructors – JSON_OBJECT and JSON_ARRAY functions allow you to construct JSON object or array from SQL data.
Even if you don’t store data in JSON format, there are good reasons why you might need to accept data in JSON format (or emit data in JSON format), especially when working with languages like R and Python.