Microsoft has just released into General Availability support for storage and retrieval of JSON data. JSON is a convenient data format used by web sites, JavaScript, REST APIs, etc. Using the new JSON functions, you can run a query against an Azure SQL database and return a JSON object or you can store JSON entities as values within Azure SQL tables.
The ability to store and retrieve JSON also means you can combine traditional relational data with no-SQL JSON data and use SQL to query both at the same time and to link relational data records and semi-structured JSON data together through queries.