By Bharath Moola, HEXstream data solutions engineer

For as long as most of us have been building software, there has been a massive divide in the development world.

On one side, you have the application developers. They live in the world of JSON because it is flexible, nested and exactly what the front end needs to render a page. On the other hand, you have database engineers. They trust relational tables because they want data to be normalized, indexed and transactionally bulletproof.

Project kickoffs usually start with the same architectural tug of war: Do we go with a document store for speed of development, or relational tables for data integrity?

Usually, we settle for a messy compromise. We use an Object Relational Mapper (ORM) that performs complex data transformations, or we build sync jobs that eventually break. However, it is now 2026, and we are finally moving past that struggle. Oracle JSON Relational Duality Views have turned that "either/or" choice into “both" solutions.

The pick-your poison era

Before this technology, we were stuck with three frustrating options:

1.     Pure relational: This was great for data integrity but a nightmare for APIs. You would spend half your sprint writing complex joins just to get a simple nested object for a mobile app.

2.     JSON in a blob: This was fast to build, but it was difficult to run a performance report or ensure a field was not missing. It was essentially a digital junk drawer.

3.     Double life: This meant storing data in tables and syncing it to a separate document store. This led to the inevitable Friday night crisis where the API showed different data than the database because a sync job failed.

Enter duality views: The live bridge

Think of a Duality View as a bridge between two worlds. It allows you to store your data once, properly normalized in relational tables, while interacting with it as if it were a native JSON document. This is not a copy or a cache; it is a live contract.

If you update a value in the JSON document, the underlying rows in your SQL tables update instantly. If a database administrator runs a SQL script on the tables, the JSON view reflects those changes immediately. It is the first time both sides of the house are looking at the exact same truth in the format they prefer.

A real-world example: Incident management

Let us say you are managing network outages. In the traditional relational world, an event record requires joining tables for events, causes, and affected services.

With a Duality View, your development team simply sees a clean JSON object containing the event ID, the status, the start time, and a nested details object.

The most impressive part is that you can send that entire JSON object back to the database, and the system handles the heavy lifting of updating the correct rows across three different tables. No mapping code or manual data shredding is required. It simply works.

Why this is a game-changer

This approach removes the friction that has slowed down development for years.

• Skip the complex mapping layers: Your REST or GraphQL services can talk directly to the view. You can stop debugging lazy loading issues and focus on building features.
• Analytics still win: Your business intelligence tools and SQL queries still see clean, indexed tables. You do not have to sacrifice reporting speed for developer agility.
• Zero-sync lag: Because there is only one source of truth, there is no background process moving data and no risk of the API getting out of step with the database.
• Built-in safety: Duality Views use optimistic locking. If two people try to edit the same JSON document at the same time, the database handles the conflict.

The bottom line

We are finally moving away from an era where we had to choose between data formatted for computers and data formatted for humans.

With JSON Relational Duality, you get the flexibility of a document store combined with the industrial-grade power of a relational engine. It is about time we stopped compromising.

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