Snowflake uses theVARIANTdata type as the native mechanism for storing semi-structured data formats such as JSON, XML, Avro, ORC, and Parquet. VARIANT supports hierarchical, nested structures and allows querying via dot or bracket path notation without requiring schema-on-write.

JSON is not a Snowflake data type—JSON documents arestored insideVARIANT.

VARIANT allows:

Mixed structured and semi-structured content

Efficient storage through Snowflake’s columnar compression

Schema-on-read flexibility

Querying nested structures without flattening

VARCHARstores plain text only.

BLOBis reserved for binary data and not suitable for interactive querying.

This design eliminates the need for preprocessing or schema enforcement at ingestion time.

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