Importing Json File to SQL Server into a variable

A short article today of how to import JSON file to SQL Server into a variable, which can then
be used to insert it into a column of type NVARCHAR(MAX) of a table. The maximum size of NVARCHAR(MAX) is 2 Gb, so you can
import large Json files using this datatype. If the Json is small and below 4000 chars, use for example NVARCHAR(4000) instead. Here is a SQL script to import the json file using OPENROWSET and Bulk import. We also pass in the path to the folder where the json file is. It is put in the same folder as the .sql file script. Note that the variable $(FullScriptDir) is passed in via a .bat file (shown further below) and we expect the .json file to be in the same folder as the .bat file. You can provide a full path to a .json file instead and skip the .bat file here and import a json file, but it is nice to load the .json file from the same folder as the .sql file in case you want to copy the .sql and .json file to another server and not having to provide and possibly having to adjust the full path. Sql-script import_json_file_openrowset.sql:

DECLARE @JSONFILE VARCHAR(MAX); 

SELECT @JSONFILE = BulkColumn
FROM OPENROWSET (BULK '$(FullScriptDir)\top-posts.json', SINGLE_CLOB) AS j;

PRINT 'JsonFile contents: ' + @JSONFILE

IF (ISJSON(@JSONFILE)=1) PRINT 'It is valid Json';

The .bat file here passes the current folder as a variable to the sql script runsqlscript.bat

@set FullScriptDir=%CD%
sqlcmd -S .\SQLEXPRESS  -i import_json_file_openrowset.sql

This outputs:

sqlcmd -S .\SQLEXPRESS  -i import_json_file_openrowset.sql
JsonFile contents: [
   {
      "Id":6107,
      "Score":176,
      "ViewCount":155988,
      "Title":"What are deconvolutional layers?",
      "OwnerUserId":8820
   },
   {
      "Id":155,
      "Score":164,
      "ViewCount":25822,
      "Title":"Publicly Available Datasets",
      "OwnerUserId":227
   }
]
It is valid Json

With the variable JSONFILE you can do whatever with it such as inserting it to a column in a new row of a table for example.
Importing json from a string directly using OPENJSON

It is also possible to directly just import the JSON from a string variable like this:

DECLARE @JSONSTRINGSAMPLE VARCHAR(MAX) 

SET @JSONSTRINGSAMPLE = N'[
 {
    "Id": 2334,
    "Score": 4.3,
    "Title": "Python - Used as scientific tool for graphing"
 },
{
    "Id": 2335,
    "Score": 5.2,
    "Title": "C# : Math and physics programming"
 }
]';

SELECT * FROM OPENJSON (@JSONSTRINGSAMPLE) WITH (
    Id INT,
    Score REAL,
    Title NVARCHAR(100)
)

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