JSON vs BSON

Json stands for javascript object notation, it is widely used to interchage the data across many applications.

Json Objects contains a key-value pair , where a string key mapped to a value (which can be a number, string, boolean, array, an empty value — null, or even another object).

This is how json object looks like — structured in human- readable format.

BSON which stands for Binary Json which MongoDB used internally for efficient storage and traversal. It is binary representation of the corresponding json files.

This is how BSON file looks like

Why BSON prefered over JSON for database?

1. JSON only supports a limited number of basic data types. Most notably, JSON lacks support for datetime and binary data.
2. JSON objects and properties don’t have fixed length which makes traversal slower.
3. JSON does not provide metadata and type information, taking longer to retrieve documents.
4. JSON is both human & machine readable while BSON is only machine readble.

MongoDB stores data in BSON format both internally and over the network. Anything you can represent in JSON can be natively stored in MongoDB and retrieved just as easily in JSON.