advanced~2.5h
MongoDB — BSON Encoding & the WiredTiger Storage Engine
Every earlier chapter treated a document as a JSON-like object you read and write. This chapter opens the box: the binary format MongoDB actually stores on the wire and on disk, and the storage engine underneath that decides how fast a write really commits, how much space a collection really takes, and how two writers to different documents in the same collection manage to not block each other.
Learning objectives
- Explain why MongoDB encodes documents as BSON rather than storing plain-text JSON.
- List the BSON types that have no JSON equivalent and why each one earns its place.
- Describe how WiredTiger achieves document-level concurrency control instead of locking a whole collection.
- Explain how WiredTiger's compression and B-tree storage layout affect both disk usage and read/write throughput.
- Reason about when a write is durable versus merely applied in memory, using the WiredTiger cache and checkpoint model.
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MongoDB — BSON Encoding & the WiredTiger Storage Engine