Purpose and implemetnation of json field type in laravel schema builder

Question

what is purpose of $table->json('options'); as field type of laravel database schema builder.I tried searching hard but couldn't get any relevant info on it.Please some one state list purpose with example

Answer 1

Some database engines - PostgreSQL being a major example - have JSON-friendly data types (that MySQL currently lacks - it'll just store as a TEXT data type there). This can be handy for working with data (like the options example you cite) that might contain a large amount of schema-less or loosely-structured data.

• http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/datatype-json.html
• http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/functions-json.html

Instead of having 100+ columns for a bunch of on/off options for a model, you could store them in a JSON object in the database.