It really depends on what the DBA's are doing.

Are they primarily focused on database development for applications or etl or reports etc....?  If so it would make sense for them...

This isn't a new trend it's been going on for a long long time that you either accept certain terms or you might lose access to certain features or even...

And how it is actually stored and transmitted is not at all standard.

Well of course not, the whole point of the relational model is that you don't have to...

No the basic syntax for describing the structure...

Which is once again not a data format, it's...

SQL is not a data format, it's s syntax for querying data.

So once again I can say this data will be in JSON format and that is a common format that can be processed by any number of standard interfaces.

The...

How do you write a query that shows which customers bought particular product groups? You have to navigate down the customer hierarchy and then back up the product group one.

What...

On the contrary, the relational representation is far more flexible than a hierarchical one. What data is sent to the client is the product of a query - and hence...

The issue isn't so much that SQL server can't parse and format json it's that the data is represented in fundamentally different ways.

In which case why bother with JSON?...

How could a system that actually makes sense work?  If SQL Server is capable of reading/writing JSON then (for many requests) there's no reason for (de)serialization and type conversion on...

If you want a single return set like you'd get with the function you would need to union the two queries together.

A lot of this really does depend on company but I've found ETL Developer naturally lends itself to a broader spectrum of offshoots.  As DB Developer the most natural path...

Well just looking at the location_id in the result set these are not duplicate records.

When you say it's sending clear text passwords, where are you seeing them?  In a log?  Are you running a packet capture?