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

Question

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 wh

Answer 1

• What's BSON?

  BSON [bee · sahn], short for Bin­ary JSON, is a bin­ary-en­coded seri­al­iz­a­tion of JSON-like doc­u­ments.

• How is it different from JSON?

  BSON is designed to be efficient in space, but in some cases is not much more efficient than JSON. In some cases BSON uses even more space than JSON. The reason for this is another of the BSON design goals: traversability. BSON adds some "extra" information to documents, like length of strings and subobjects. This makes traversal faster.

  BSON is also designed to be fast to encode and decode. For example, integers are stored as 32 (or 64) bit integers, so they don't need to be parsed to and from text. This uses more space than JSON for small integers, but is much faster to parse.

  In addition to compactness, BSON adds additional data types unavailable in JSON, notably the BinData and Date data types.

Source: http://bsonspec.org/