SQL SERVER – Understanding JSON Use is Case-Sensitive

The things I get to learn from my daughter is amazing. I think all of us need to constantly explore without any prejudice and set biases. Whenever I get a new toy for some occasion, I see there is at least a half hour of exploration to understand how the toy works and she goes into a whole new world of searching new ways to play. This makes the whole experience worth it. Let us learn about JSON.

This is almost the same experience I go through working with SQL Server. With SQL Server 2016 introducing JSON, there are a few blogs that I can circle back on using this new capability already. But when you start using the same, the learnings can be multifold. Let us understand from the below code to what the potential value would be:

DECLARE @myjson NVARCHAR(MAX) =
'{
	"Name": "Pinal",
	"Surname": "Kumar",
	"Birth": {"DOB":"2000-12-12" , "Town":"Gandhi Nagar", "Country":"India"}
}'
SELECT JSON_VALUE(@myjson, '$.Name')

As you can see, this is relatively simple code and I am trying to retrieve the value available in the “Name” property. This would return “Pinal” as shown below.

Having said that, if you make a simple mistake of even using a different case or even if you try to retrieve a property that is not existing, the output would be NULL.

SELECT JSON_VALUE(@myjson, '$.name')

SELECT JSON_VALUE(@myjson, '$.name123')

In the above example, both the statements will return you NULL. As I try to wrap up this blog, I want to see how you would solve the above problem? How will you know it was an invalid property or a case sensitive problem? Write it over comments and share your experience.

Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)

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