Scalar functions let you encapsulate a calculation into a stored procedure-like snippet of SQL. It’s common practice to return the results of a scalar function as a column in a SELECT query.

Probably for a query that your application runs occasionally, in-memory processing of JSON data might still be an option. In general, though, querying through JSON-dedicated functions and letting SQL ...

Effectively, those methods can become just thin wrappers around SQL queries. If you want to play with SQL Server’s JSON support (or the other big new feature in SQL Server 2016, temporal tables), you ...