MongoDB is a document-oriented DBMS. MongoDB documents are stored as binary JSON (BSON). This is similar to JSON, but with support for additional data types. JSON field values can only be strings, numbers, objects, arrays, Booleans, or null. BSON supports more specific numeric types, dates and timestamps, regular expressions, and binary data. As the name suggests, BSON documents are stored and transferred as binary data. This can be more efficient than JSON's string representation.
MongoDB documents are stored in collections. These work very much like tables in a traditional relational database. Documents can be inserted, updated, and queried. There are two key differences from a traditional relational database:
MongoDB does not support server-side joins. In a traditional RDBMS, you would normalize data into multiple tables and join across them using foreign keys. In MongoDB, you instead use BSON's nested structure to denormalize data about each entity into a single document...