What is BSON and exactly how is it different from JSON?

json mongodb bson nosql
Akshat Jiwan Sharma picture Akshat Jiwan Sharma · Sep 15, 2012 · Viewed 83.9k times · Source

I am just starting out with MongoDB and one of the things that I have noticed is that it uses BSON to store data internally. However the documentation is not exactly clear on what BSON is and how it is used in MongoDB. Can someone explain it to me, please?

Answer

JohnnyHK picture JohnnyHK · Sep 15, 2012

BSON is the binary encoding of JSON-like documents that MongoDB uses when storing documents in collections. It adds support for data types like Date and binary that aren't supported in JSON.

In practice, you don't have to know much about BSON when working with MongoDB, you just need to use the native types of your language and the supplied types (e.g. ObjectId) of its driver when constructing documents and they will be mapped into the appropriate BSON type by the driver.

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