gislenius

If you want to explore fully specified alternatives, there is also the RumbleDB engine (www.rumbledb.org), which implements JSONiq, like Xidel. It can be downloaded as a single jar file, and used with a simple java command: queries can be run as single commands (possibly reading from stdin, like jq), or on the shell, or in Jupyter notebooks.

RumbleDB is free, with no restriction on commercial use, and open source. It is an academic project, the product of now 6 years of work by 20+ ETH Zurich BSc and MSc students in their projects and theses.

You will find a video tutorial given at the Declarative Amsterdam conference last year here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YkLXQVyN2o (link edited, it was wrong)

RumbleDB works with small JSON files but also with several terabytes of JSON. It also works with many other formats; for example, it allows validating data and then storing it in a more efficient binary format (like Parquet).

It works on a laptop by spreading the computations on all the cores, but also in the cloud (it was tested on a cluster of 64 Amazon EMR machines manipulating billions of objects).

It can read and write data to and from a laptop's local drive, but also to and from data lakes (S3, HDFS...).

Feature-wise, JSONiq can do everything SQL can do (projection, selection, grouping, sorting, joins, etc), while also supporting heterogeneous and nested datasets seamlessly (normalization, denormalization, navigation, etc). 95% of it is directly based on a W3C standard including many of its builtin functions.

RumbleDB also has a Machine Learning library.