wt utility is often used to operate on the MongoDB database to analyse issues or to recover the database to a functional state. Though the utility allows to do some basic operations on string keys and values, it is relatively hard to use it for the MongoDB files, which are mostly numeric keys and binary values.

Recently we used wt utility to read through some MongoDB internal collections but then wrote a separate program to update the binary values in the collection to bring it back to a functional state.

This ticket will track efforts to make it easier to use the wt tool to insert, delete, update and read the tables with numeric keys and binary value. eg: Given a numeric key, read the binary value from a table and dump into a file. Similarly, given a file with binary data, write the contents of that file as the value to a key.

I have also created SERVER-82105 to make it easier to take the binary data and interpret it as BSON, and edit it as needed. This WT ticket along with the SERVER ticket will give us more tooling to operate on MongoDB databases for analysis and support.