Persisting JSON data

There are several reasons why we might want to serialize a JSON file:

• We may have retrieved the data with an API but need to keep a snapshot of the data.
• The data in the JSON file is relatively static and informs our data cleaning and analysis over multiple phases of a project.
• We might decide that the flexibility of a schema-less format such as JSON helps us solve many data cleaning and analysis problems.

It is worth highlighting this last reason to use JSON – that it can solve many data problems. Although tabular data structures clearly have many benefits, particularly for operational data, they are often not the best way to store data for analysis purposes. In preparing data for analysis, a substantial amount of time is spent either merging data from different tables or dealing with data redundancy when working with flat files. Not only are these processes time-consuming but every merge or reshaping leaves the door open...