[bombela]

It's harder to form a tree with key value. I also tried the relational route. But it would always messup the cardinality (one person should have 0 or n friends, but a person has a single birth date).

[sheepscreek]

You could flatten it using namespaced keys. Eg.

    {
      parent1: { child1: value }
    }

Becomes one of the following:

    parent1/child1=value
    parent1_child1=value
    parent1.child1=value

..you get the idea.

[rubyskills]

It's also harder to stream JSON? Maybe I'm overthinking this.