UBJSON is a binary storage format for JSON data. The UBJSON specification is located at http://ubjson.org/. UBJSON is designed to do the following:
- Retain the simplicity of JSON by not introducing any extension to the JSON data types
- Improve the storage space required and the ability to traverse the data
UBJSON provides the most benefits in the following cases:
- When storage compactness is desired and documents have a large amount of numbers as values
- When retrieval of portions of the document is more important or is done more frequently than insertion of the data
Numeric types are always serialized in little-endian format. This is a deviation from the proposed UBJSON standard which specifies that numeric types are stored in big-endian format. Vantage stores the data in little-endian format to optimize insertion and retrieval times.
Data cannot be imported to or exported from the database in the UBJSON format. UBJSON encodes strings in the UTF-8 character set, and the character set for UBJSON data when it is imported or exported as text is UNICODE.