Does MariaDB support native JSON column data type?
JSON support will come to MariaDB 10.2. See the official MariaDB blog post from 28.02.2017. There are some example SQL statements and validation.


  JSON is fast becoming the standard format for data interchange and for
  unstructured data, and MariaDB 10.2 adds a range on JSON supporting
  functions, even though a JSON datatype isn't implemented yet. There
  are some reasons why there isn't a JSON datatype, but one is that
  there are actually not that many advantages to that as JSON is a
  text-based format. This blog post aims to describe JSON and the use
  cases for it, as well as to describe the MariaDB 10.2 JSON functions
  and uses for these, as well as showing some other additions to MariaDB
  10.2 that are useful for JSON processing.