BSON
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BSON, short for Bin•ary JSON, is a bin•ary-en•coded seri•al•iz•a•tion of JSON-like doc•u•ments. Like JSON, BSON sup•ports the em•bed•ding of doc•u•ments and ar•rays with•in oth•er doc•u•ments and ar•rays. BSON also con•tains ex•ten•sions that al•low rep•res•ent•a•tion of data types that are not part of the JSON spec. For ex•ample, BSON has a Date type and a BinData type. MongoDB uses BSON internally for storing the database.
BSON was de•signed to have the fol•low•ing three char•ac•ter•ist•ics:
• Lightweight: Keep•ing spa•tial over•head to a min•im•um is im•port•ant for any data rep•res•ent•a•tion format, es•pe•cially when used over the net•work.
• Traversable: BSON is de•signed to be tra•versed eas•ily. This is a vi•tal prop•erty in its role as the primary data rep•res•ent•a•tion for Mon•goDB.
• Efficient: En•cod•ing data to BSON and de•cod•ing from BSON can be per•formed very quickly in most lan•guages due to the use of C data types.