Question

I have been told MongoDB uses the GridFS filesystem for storing files. However, Is there any way to store the file themselves in the database BSON structure by serializing or base64 encoding ?

Thanks and appreciate any help.

Answer 1

Sure, you can serialize your file as string and store it in document field. But in such approach there is one downside – all your files should < then 16 mb (size limit of one document).

Mongodb gridfs build on top of mongodb collections, and contains two collections:

1. Files — metadata of file (name, size, id, any other info you want to save)
2. Chunks — collection that contains serialized body of file. If size of file more then 16 mb limit mongodb automatically create additional chunk. So any file will be persisted in mongodb as one file document and >=1 chunk documents.

You can check here how file looks like in mongodb.

So, if you decided to store files in mongodb it is better to use common, tested by community approach – gridfs.