In DBMSes like MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, data is saved as BSON, JSON or JSONB for JSON columns or document.
All of these data types use space for key names in JSON.
Does internal data on disk also require space for every key name on every row?
If yes, shouldn't a developer/admin care about it, for performance and storage cost reasons?
Is there any solution or are there any attempts to respond to these concerns?
MySQL/MariaDB:
The string is stored as a string. This takes space and slows down looking into the string.
So, you should, in general, pull the useful columns out of the JSON and put them into columns -- this will usually take less space and provide more efficient indexing, searching, sorting, etc.
If you still have miscellaneous key-value pairs (or structures), then JSON may be a good way to store things. But think of it like storing a JPG. You don't look at the individual pixels in such a BLOB; you merely hand it off to someone else.
Yes, the field names are stored in every JSON document. If you use long field names in the JSON document, the document uses more storage on every row of the table.
I showed this in my presentation How to use JSON in MySQL Wrong.
Whereas if you store attributes in the conventional way, in a normal column of the table per attribute, the name of the column is stored only once, in the table metadata. Only the value is stored in every row.
Using JSON in a relational database is great for cloud providers' profit, but is usually a drag on software efficiency.
For relational databases (RDBMS) like MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSql it matters a lot, because they store the JSON as text. See the other answers.
For a NoSQL database like MongoDB it looks a bit different. By default the BSON data is compressed, the storage is more efficient than storing JSON as pure text. However, of course longer field names consume more space on disk than short names.
