So far we have seen how to store text values, dates, and numbers fields in a document. Binary content also needs to be stored at times in the database. Consider cases where users upload their photographs or scanned copies of documents that need to be stored in the database. In relational databases, the BLOB data type is the most commonly used type to address these requirements. Mongo too supports binary contents to be stored in a document in the collection. The catch is that the total size of the document shouldn't exceed 16 MB, which is the upper limit of the document size at the time of writing this book. In this recipe, we will store a small image file in Mongo's document and also retrieve it later. If the content you wish to store in MongoDB collections is greater than 16 MB, MongoDB offers an out-of-the-box solution called GridFS. We will see how to use GridFS in the Storing large data in MongoDB using GridFS recipe later in this chapter.