Summary
Document the contents of the BSONColumn (binary subtype 7) format.
Motivation
Affected users are application developers and advanced users directly accessing system.buckets.X collections containing time-series data.
By documenting our format in a public place, we encourage new innovative uses of this format, including the development of efficient third-party tools to import and export time-series data.
How does this affect the end user?
The initial loading of data into MongoDB is currently very slow, as it has to be done measurement by measurement through the command interface. With a tool that converts, for example,{{ .csv}} files directly to time-series buckets using the BSONColumn format, we could significantly speed up import of large amounts of time-series data.
The user may feel more confident knowing their data is stored in a documented format that is part of the BSON specification. Even without tools to directly read BSONColumn data, just the fact that the format is documented may alleviate discomfort with not being able to directly "see" how the information is stored.