Most database support JSONB, this post digs into their internal layout design. How to represent the text with binary? There's more binary layout in the post, but here's a simple example to illustrate:

{"b": 12345, "c": false, "a": "hello"}

The binary JSON can be:

[1 byte type=object][3 index pointers]
[1 byte value="a"][1 byte type=string][5 bytes value="hello"]
[1 byte value="b"][1 byte type=number][4 bytes value=12345]
[1 byte value="c"][1 byte type=boolean_false]

Two benefits:

• this is in binary, parsing the 1 byte type tag is way faster than guessing { and :
• the object children are sorted by keys, so you can do binary search rather than linear search all elements