The MariaDB CONNECT storage engine now offers access to JSON file and allows you to see a external JSON file as a MariaDB table. The CONNECT storage Engine has the capability to auto discover a table structure when the table correspond to external data. The MariaDB CONNECT storage engine comes with a set of UDFs (user defined functions) to manipulate the JSON format. This JSON content can be stored in a normal text column. This approach can be used as a way to implement dynamic columns. Beside JSON the MariaDB CONNECT Storage Engine allows to access various file formats (CSV, XML, JSON, Excel, etc). It also gives access to any ODBC data sources (Oracle, DB2, SQLServer, etc). These various capabilities of foreign datasources access makes it a perfect tool for data integration.