SQLite 3.45 Released With JSON Functions Adapted To Use JSONB

SQLite 3.45 was released today with the SQLITE_DIRECT_OVERFLOW_READ optimization being enabled by default that can help for apps relying on SQLite and doing a lot of reads of large BLOBs or strings deliver better read performance. There are also query planner improvements while most interesting with SQLite 3.45 is all JSON functions being rewritten to use the new JSONB format.

The JSONB-ed version of SQLite's JSON functions can deliver several times better performance than the existing JSON support within SQLite. This is a new internal-use binary representation of JSON that is stored as an SQL BLOB.

JSONB is described in the SQLite documentation as:

"SQLite allows its internal "parse tree" representation of JSON to be stored on disk, as a BLOB, in a format that we call "JSONB". By storing SQLite's internal binary representation of JSON directly in the database, applications can bypass the overhead of parsing and rendering JSON when reading and updating JSON values. The internal JSONB format is also uses slightly less disk space then text JSON.

Any SQL function parameter that accepts text JSON as an input will also accept a BLOB in the JSONB format. The function will operate the same in either case, except that it will run faster when the input is JSONB, since it does not need to run the JSON parser."

The JSONB support and other performance optimizations with SQLite 3.45 are great news with this open-source embed-friendly SQL database library being widely used by a multitude of applications from the desktop to server and embedded/mobile purposes.

More details on the new JSONB support for SQLite's JSON support and other SQLite 3.45 changes can be found via the change-log on SQLite.org.