See if an JSON array in MySQL contains an object whose key holds a specific date
One solution as provided by Morgan Tucker - @morgo is to use json_contains like so:

select * from applications where json_contains(`data`, '{"date" : "2016-04-26"}')


For now the answer is OK, but i believe it can have some performance issues and feels a bit hackish to me (see the next query) - but I will deal with those when i get there :)

If I would need to query on a date range (from 2016-04-24 to 2016-04-26) I would need to add an invididual json_contains for each day in the time span like so:

select * from applications where json_contains(`data`, '{"date" : "2016-04-26"}') or json_contains(`data`, '{"date" : "2016-04-25"}') or json_contains(`data`, '{"date" : "2016-04-24"}')


And this would return invalid data if I would have an date key nested somewhere else

So if you have an different solution, I would like to know