Hi Drew,
Thank you for writing to us regarding your concern. If you are using our client libraries, it is not possible to retrieve the data as a JSON object. However, as an alternative you can use the cURL operation to get the output in JSON format and implement the logic on your end to export it to MySQL database. You can refer to this guide for more details on how to interact with Google Ads API using cURL. Please give this a try and let me know if this helps.
Regards,
Nikisha Patel, Google Ads API Team