Regarding odb dumps saved into the midas output files, there are several
requests to make it possible to save odb in the json format.

Since 2019-02-12 commits
https://bitbucket.org/tmidas/midas/commits/ccaeeef4d6a1f0d91a67f2dc0a68105b7f6b77ae
and
https://bitbucket.org/tmidas/midas/commits/b3251587a68ef577919c81a221559e9af4dc8ae6

The format of the odb dump is specified by ODB
/Logger/Channels/0/Settings/ODB dump format (default is "json", was hardcoded as "xml").

The filename of the odb dump file saved at the end of run is specified by ODB
/Logger/ODB Last Dump File (default is "last.json", was hardcoded as "last.xml").

In addition, the following defaults have been changed, enabling LZ4 compession and CRC32C checksums by default:

/Logger/ODB dump file (new default is "run%05d.json", was "run%05d.odb")
/Logger/Channels/0/Settings/
Output "FILE"
Compress "lz4"
Checksum "CRC32C".

This brings mlogger default settings closer to what one would expect in the 21st century - "free" compression (LZ4)
and output file data integrity protected by checksums (CRC32C). These defaults are "free" in the sense that turning
them off would not noticeably improve the system performance. (Some users may want to enable better compression,
such as BZIP2 or PBZIP2 and better checksums, such as SHA256 or SHA512 - both choices that have significant CPU-use cost).

The default ODB dump format is now consistently "json" (vs the previous mix of XML and ODB formats).

Why "json" as the default? There has to be some default. The old ODB dump format is right out. Compared to XML,
JSON dump file size is smaller and the encoder is faster (important for reducing the time to start a run - where ODB dump is done twice). Tools for parsing 
JSON data are more widely available and "JSON has won in the marketplace". See also https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_json_xml.asp

Those who want to continue to use XML ODB dumps can trivially continue to do so by changing the settings listed above.

In the rootana package, we have the XmlOdb class for parsing XML ODB dumps, but no matching JsonOdb class for parsing
JSON ODB data. This reminds me of difficulties working with XML data. I originally wrote the XmlOdb class using
the "libxml2" package. After discovering that many Linux distributions do not install this package by default, I switched
to the DOM and XML parsers from ROOT (since rootana is not very useful without ROOT anyway). Only to discover that
some binary ROOT distributions distributed by CERN exclude the XML parser from their default build.

I do intend to write the JsonOdb class for rootana, and I will probably do it using the mjson.{h,cxx} parser that I wrote
for MIDAS. (lack of the JsonOdb class is the reason I did not switch MIDAS ODB dumps to JSON much earlier
than now. the camel back was broken by the extra slow run start time in the ALPHA-g DAQ system).

K.O.