Before SQL Server 2025, if you want to store JSON data in Microsoft SQL Server or Azure SQL DB, and you want fast queries, the easiest way is to:
Store the data in an NVARCHAR(MAX) column (because the native JSON datatype didn’t arrive until SQL Server 2025) Add a computed column for the specific JSON keys we’ll want to query quickly Index those keys Query it using the JSON_VALUE function
To demo what I mean, I’m going to take the Users table from the Stack Overflow database, and I’m going to pretend that we’re only storing the Id