Rahul Sharma (Editor)

BSON

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Filename extension
  
.bson

Type of format
  
Data interchange

Standard
  
no RFC yet

Internet media type
  
none

Extended from
  
JSON

Website
  
bsonspec.org

BSON /ˈbiːsən/ is a computer data interchange format used mainly as a data storage and network transfer format in the MongoDB database. It is a binary form for representing simple data structures, associative arrays (called objects or documents in MongoDB), and various data types of specific interest to MongoDB. The name "BSON" is based on the term JSON and stands for "Binary JSON".

Contents

Data types and syntax

BSON documents (objects) consist of an ordered list of elements. Each element consists of a field name, a type, and a value. Field names are strings. Types include:

  • string
  • integer (32- or 64-bit)
  • double (64-bit IEEE 754 floating point number)
  • date (integer number of milliseconds since the Unix epoch)
  • byte array (binary data)
  • boolean (true and false)
  • null
  • BSON object
  • BSON array
  • Javascript Code
  • MD5 Binary Data
  • Regular Expression

    • BSON types are nominally a superset of JSON types (JSON does not have a date or a byte array type, for example), with one exception of not having a universal "number" type as JSON does.

    Efficiency

    Compared to JSON, BSON is designed to be efficient both in storage space and scan-speed. Large elements in a BSON document are prefixed with a length field to facilitate scanning. In some cases, BSON will use more space than JSON due to the length prefixes and explicit array indices.

    Example

    A document such as {"hello":"world"} will be stored as:

    References

    BSON Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA