JSONiq for JSON users

This tutorial introduces the JSONiq language, which declaratively manipulates JSON data.

Static version

A user-friendly display of the tutorial is located here, if you just want to take a look with no setup: just ignore the instructions and scroll your way down.

Interactive version

You can also download the tutorial, which is a Jupyter notebook, from here and set it up on your machine with just a few easy steps, so that you can execute the queries yourself and even change them or enter your own. Instructions on how to do so are included in the notebook (you can also see them on the static version).

If you choose to download and run this notebook, we recommend installing Anaconda to take care of the installation of needed software automatically. It is a popular data science software package with in particular: Jupyter notebooks, Python and Spark. As for Rumble (the JSONiq engine used by the tutorial), it is a 15 MB jar with no installation required. Instructions on how to run it in the background are also included in the notebook.

Zorba

The queries in the notebook also can be run on a local installation of Zorba.

Some people like to use the Zorba sandbox. If you do so, here are a few important comments:

• You will need to add

  jsoniq version "1.0";
  

before each query to tell Zorba that it's a JSONiq query. For a local installation, Zorba will recognize .jq files as JSONiq.

• This sandbox currently runs on an older version of Zorba (2.9), in which not all syntactic features were mature yet. Expect a few discrepancies, but look at the examples on the sandbox page for guidance on them. If you need the latest version, we suggest downloading Zorba 3.0 locally from here.