[mattnewton]

But there are database tools emerging to deal with JSON, like Postgres (and Mongodb.) I haven't used Mongo in production, but postgres's json support is fantastic and materially better than anything I have seen with XML. Sometimes you really do need to store nearly schemaless data and operate on it for some time.

[cakes]

As reference there are/were tools in something like MSSQL for dealing with XML.

[mgkimsal]

mysql has had xml/xpath query functions for a while too, iirc.