1. Fast scan-ability. For very large JSON documents, scanning can be slow. To skip a nested document or array we have to scan through the intervening field completely. In addition as we go we must count nestings of braces, brackets, and quotation marks. In BSON, the size of these elements is at the beginning of the field’s value, which makes skipping an element easy.

2. Easy manipulation. We want to be able to modify information within a document efficiently.

3. Additional data types. JSON is potentially a great interchange format, but it would be nice to have a a few more data types. Most importantly is the addition of a “byte array” data type. This avoids any need to do base64 encoding, which is awkward.

I don’t know of any other usage of BSON than MongoDB.

Original title and link: What Are the Goals of BSON? (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://blog.mongodb.org/post/9333386434/bson-and-data-interchange

I’ve spent the past three days diving into MongoDB and jQuery. [ …] But the real attraction is the ability to work with syntax very similar to Javascript and JSON from client to server to database. Just better for my relatively weak, pan-fried brain.

Let’s not forget though, that MongoDB is BSON so you’ll need to go through a native driver. But there are other NoSQL databases that speak natively JSON (e.g. CouchDB) and that may not even need a server side component.

Original title and link: MongoDB Impressions (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

via: http://charliecrystle.com/2010/11/22/mongodb-impressions/