Snowflake is a really interesting new data warehouse built on top of AWS. I like their architecture because they had the interesting idea to separate data storage (backed by small files on S3) and compute to run queries (EC2 instances running their API).
I inherited a project where we would store complex JSON in a string in a field as varchar(64000). Then we would use regex patterns to get the values we wanted from them. Sometimes these regexes would get really involved, yuck.
The Variant data...
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