Too Long; Didn't Read
MariaDB is a free (yea, free) open-source database solution that you can use for anything from some lightweight tinkering to supporting fully-fledged, production-grade applications. At its core, it's a relational database management system, but diving deeper into its capabilities you’ll quickly discover that it's more than that. One of those capabilities is its ability to handle JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) formatted data, completely free and out-of-the-box. The ability to store. JSON documents within a. relational database allows you to create hybrid data models, containing both structured and semi-structured data.