Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Ruminating on BSON vs JSON

MongoDB uses BSON  as the default format to store documents in collections. BSON is a binary-encoded serialization of JSON-like documents. But what are the advantages of BSON over the ubiquitous JSON format?

In terms of space (memory footprint), BSON is generally more efficient than JSON, but it need not always be so. 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.

The primary goal of BSON is to enable very fast traversability i.e faster processing. BSON adds extra information to documents, e.g. length prefixes, that make it easy and fast to traverse. Due to this the BSON parser can parse through the documents at blinding speed.

Thus BSON sacrifices space efficiency for processing efficiency (a.k.a traversability). This is a fair trade-off for MongoDB where speed is the primary concern. 

No comments:

Post a Comment