BSON, short for Binary [JSON](JSON.md), is a binary-encoded serialization of [JSON](JSON.md)-like documents. Like [JSON](JSON.md), BSON supports the embedding of documents and arrays within other documents and arrays. BSON also contains extensions that allow representation of data types that are not part of the [JSON](JSON.md) spec. For example, BSON has a Date type and a BinData type. [MongoDB](../applications/development/MongoDB.md) uses BSON internally for storing the database.
BSON was designed to have the following three characteristics:
- Lightweight: Keeping spatial overhead to a minimum is important for any data representation format, especially when used over the network.
- Traversable: BSON is designed to be traversed easily. This is a vital property in its role as the primary data representation for MongoDB.
- Efficient: Encoding data to BSON and decoding from BSON can be performed very quickly in most languages due to the use of C data types.
