It is quite common to meet developers outside of the Microsoft stack who look down on products from Redmond. Web developers in particular have been critical of the access to modern data exchange structures, or rather the lack of it. JSON has become the de facto data exchange method for the application development world. It is similar in structure to the previous cool-kid XML, but for reasons beyond the scope of this book, JSON has overtaken XML and is the expected payload for application and database communications. Microsoft has included JSON as a native data type in SQL Server 2016 and provided a set of functions to accompany the data type.