I have a Redshift table that looks like this:
id | metadata
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | [{"pet":"dog"},{"country":"uk"}]
2 | [{"pet":"cat"}]
3 | []
4 | [{"country":"germany"},{"education":"masters"},{"country":"belgium"}]
I am wanting to get back a table that looks like this:
id | field | value
------------------------
1 | pet | dog
1 | country | uk
2 | pet | cat
4 | country | germany
4 | education | masters
4 | country | belgium
I can then combine this with my queries on the rest of the input table.
I have tried playing around with the Redshift JSON functions, but without being able to write functions/use loops/have variables in Redshift, I really can't see a way to do this!
Please let me know if I can clarify anything else.
Thanks to this inspired blog post, I've been able to craft a solution. This is:
Create a look-up table to effectively 'iterate' over the elements of each array. The number of rows in this table has be equal to or greater than the maximum number of elements of arrays. Let's say this is 4 (it can be calculated using SELECT MAX(JSON_ARRAY_LENGTH(metadata)) FROM input_table
):
CREATE VIEW seq_0_to_3 AS
SELECT 0 AS i UNION ALL
SELECT 1 UNION ALL
SELECT 2 UNION ALL
SELECT 3
);
From this, we can create one row per JSON element:
WITH exploded_array AS (
SELECT id, JSON_EXTRACT_ARRAY_ELEMENT_TEXT(metadata, seq.i) AS json
FROM input_table, seq_0_to_3 AS seq
WHERE seq.i < JSON_ARRAY_LENGTH(metadata)
)
SELECT *
FROM exploded_array;
Producing:
id | json
------------------------------
1 | {"pet":"dog"}
1 | {"country":"uk"}
2 | {"pet":"cat"}
4 | {"country":"germany"}
4 | {"education":"masters"}
4 | {"country":"belgium"}
However, I was needing to extract the field names/values. As I can't see any way to extract JSON field names using Redshift's limited functions, I'll do this using a regular expression:
WITH exploded_array AS (
SELECT id, JSON_EXTRACT_ARRAY_ELEMENT_TEXT(metadata, seq.i) AS json
FROM input_table, seq_0_to_3 AS seq
WHERE seq.i < JSON_ARRAY_LENGTH(metadata)
)
SELECT id, field, JSON_EXTRACT_PATH_TEXT(json, field)
FROM (
SELECT id, json, REGEXP_SUBSTR(json, '[^{"]\\w+[^"]') AS field
FROM exploded_array
);