Insert a single object into json file without rewriting entire file

Question

I\'m working on a method that uses JSON.NET to add a horse object to a JSON-formatted database of horses. One option is to deserialize the entire file into a list of horses,

Answer 1

JSON isn't a database format, and a JSON file on disk is just a flat file with data that happens to be structured, which allows you to treat it - in memory - as objects. But on disk, it's just a text file, and filesystems are not designed for efficient insertion of data into the middle of a file, not without very tricky manipulation of the filesystem itself, as the answers here suggest.

Yes, it is inefficient. If you want efficiency, use a database that's designed for updates. However, for relatively small JSON files, this theoretical inefficiency may be meaningless if saving the entire file to disk takes a fraction of a second.