Convert JSON array in MySQL to rows

It’s true that it’s not a good idea to denormalize into JSON, but sometimes you need to deal with JSON data, and there’s a way to extract a JSON array into rows in a query.

The trick is to perform a join on a temporary or inline table of indexes, which gives you a row for each non-null value in a JSON array. I.e., if you have a table with values 0, 1, and 2 that you join to a JSON array “fish” with two entries, then fish[0] matches 0, resulting in one row, and fish1 matches 1, resulting in a second row, but fish[2] is null so it doesn’t match the 2 and doesn’t produce a row in the join. You need as many numbers in the index table as the max length of any array in your JSON data. It’s a bit of a hack, and it’s about as painful as the OP’s example, but it’s very handy.

Example (requires MySQL 5.7.8 or later):

CREATE TABLE t1 (rec_num INT, jdoc JSON);
INSERT INTO t1 VALUES 
  (1, '{"fish": ["red", "blue"]}'), 
  (2, '{"fish": ["one", "two", "three"]}');

SELECT
  rec_num,
  idx,
  JSON_EXTRACT(jdoc, CONCAT('$.fish[', idx, ']')) AS fishes
FROM t1
  -- Inline table of sequential values to index into JSON array
JOIN ( 
  SELECT  0 AS idx UNION
  SELECT  1 AS idx UNION
  SELECT  2 AS idx UNION
  -- ... continue as needed to max length of JSON array
  SELECT  3
  ) AS indexes
WHERE JSON_EXTRACT(jdoc, CONCAT('$.fish[', idx, ']')) IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY rec_num, idx;

The result is:

+---------+-----+---------+
| rec_num | idx | fishes  |
+---------+-----+---------+
|       1 |   0 | "red"   |
|       1 |   1 | "blue"  |
|       2 |   0 | "one"   |
|       2 |   1 | "two"   |
|       2 |   2 | "three" |
+---------+-----+---------+

It looks like the MySQL team may add a JSON_TABLE function in MySQL 8 to make all this easier. (http://mysqlserverteam.com/mysql-8-0-labs-json-aggregation-functions/) (The MySQL team has added a JSON_TABLE function.)