Enable supports_json? for 2016 and up with a little bit of sugar.

[metaskills]

Adds a simple JSON type for creating an underlying nvarchar(max) column to add JSON too. Since SQL Server does not have a true JSON type. This means supporting JSON from a Rails perspective is a simple as adding the proper SQL Server type to your model's column which has some form of underlying string type.

create_table :users do |t|
  t.string :name, :email
  t.json :data # Creates a nvarchar(max) column.
 end

class Users < ActiveRecord::Base
  attribute :data, ActiveRecord::Type::SQLServer::Json.new
end

This allows you to save and return JSON data and query it as needed.

User.create! name: 'DJ Ruby Rhod', data: nil
User.create! name: 'Ken Collins', data: { 'admin' => true, 'foo' => 'bar' }

admin = User.where("JSON_VALUE(data, '$.admin') = CAST(1 AS BIT)").first
admin.data['foo'] # => "bar"

Fixes #485.

[meet-bhagdev]

@metaskills this is really cool. Would something similar work in Tiny_TDS?

[metaskills]

Oh yea... TinyTDS is just the means to execute SQL. In reality this work is more about documentation than doing anything.