Neil Gelder gives an introduction to JSON in SQL Server 2016:
A new feature in SQL Server 2016 (also available in Azure SQL database) is the ability to create and query JSON (Javascript object notation) documents, which have now become a common alternative to XML.
Lets look at some examples, I’ll be using tables from the new sample database for SQL Server 2016 WorldWideImporters which you can download from this link
I’m of two minds with JSON support: I think it’s very useful for building output sets for service calls and might be fine for inputs when you can’t use a table-valued parameter for some reason, but if you’re doing a lot of JSON splitting of data in a table, that’s a violation of first normal form.