A Lightweight JSON Storage Method Based on Adjacency Linked Lists

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a popular data transformation and exchange standard for various different APIs (Application Program Interfaces) over the World Wide Web. With the increasing popularity of JSON format data in more and more applications, a natural problem is how to store and process JSON data efficiently. In this paper, we first survey the state of art methods to store and process JSON format data. There are mainly five ways to store and process JSON format data: the first way uses raw JSON data format in database systems, the second way uses native data type of databases to store JSON data, the third way uses a mapping or wrapper layer on the top of different database management systems to map or wrap JSON data into the underlying databases, the fourth way integrates JSON data in commercial database systems, and the fifth way uses specific data structures to store and process JSON data. Then, we give a formal description of JSON data based on tree model which can describe the data structures and semantics of the underlying JSON data. Finally, a method based on adjacency linked lists to store JSON data is proposed, in which the {key: value}pairs, and the relationships between keys of JSON data are preserved by the linked lists in the adjacency linked lists of JSON data, and the complexity of the method is analyzed in the paper.