When I was leaving Oracle I wrote a blog post saying what I stop working on JSON UDF project. However I still receive bug reports privately and publicly.

Although I feel good seeing my project used I still don't want to restart work on it. After all idea of it was mostly preparing interface for native JSON functions, available in 5.7. Since 5.7 is GA now I strictly recommend to upgrade for everyone who can do it.

If you need JSON functions native ones have big advantage: they are much faster than UDF. This is not only because algorithms used (I never tested mine for speed btw), but also because 5.7 has …

MySQL 5.7 comes with built-in JSON support, comprising two major features:

• A native JSON data type
• A set of built-in functions to manipulate values of the JSON type

Despite being added rather recently (in MySQL 5.7.8 to be precise - one point release number before the 5.7.9 GA version), I feel the JSON support so far looks rather useful. Improvements are certainly possible, but compared to for example XML support (added in 5.1 and 5.5), the JSON feature set added to 5.7.8 is reasonably complete, coherent and standards-compliant.

(We can of course also phrase …