I am becoming more and more comfortable with storing everything in JSON.

With its JSON arrow operators and indexed expressions, SQLite makes a really nice JSON document store.

Assume you have a "cars" table with nothing but a "cars" column that is a JSON blob. Then selecting the models of all cars is just:

    SELECT cars->>'model' FROM cars

I wish MariaDB would follow suit and also support arrow operators. You can do it in MariaDB, but it becomes more cumbersome:

    SELECT JSON_UNQUOTE(JSON_EXTRACT(cars, '$.model')) FROM cars