The alternative is not super exciting though. My experience with NoSQL has been pretty shit so far. Might change this year as the company I’m at has a perfect case for migrating to NoSQL but I’ve been waiting for over a year for things to move forward…
Also, I had a few cases where storing JSON was super appropriate : we had a form and we wanted to store the answers. It made no sense to create tables and shit, since the form itself could change over time! Having JSON was an elegant way to store the answers. Being able to actually query the JSON via Oracle SQL was like dark magic, and my instincts were all screaming at the obvious trap, but I was rather impressed by the ability.
Doesn’t sound too weird to me. In my experience, devs always focus too much on positive / correct inputs, as they want things to work. Which is why you need testers that will catch all the weird crazy ways people can break things. Testers shouldn’t even see the code of it can’t handle nominal cases.