Stores documents as BSON (a binary version of JSON) and is open source. Existing drivers and tools carry on working against Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB.
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Terms in this definition
- BSON
Binary JSON, the binary form of JSON that MongoDB uses. Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB uses it too, and you query it with MQL, the MongoDB Query Language.
- JSON
Text-based format for structured data. ARM templates and Cosmos DB documents are written in it, and most Azure REST APIs exchange request and response bodies as application/json.
- Cosmos DB
NoSQL database distributed globally, offering writes in multiple regions, automatic indexing and latency below 10 ms.
Related terms
- Azure DocumentDB
Called Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB (vCore) until its renaming on 18 November 2025, this managed MongoDB-compatible document database is now a service in its own right. It scales by vCores, whereas the separate Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB uses request units.
- Document database
A NoSQL store whose values are JSON documents that it is designed to parse and query, so it is really a specialised key-value store. In Azure, Cosmos DB offers this through its NoSQL and MongoDB APIs.
- MQL
MongoDB's object-oriented query syntax, in which each operation is a method invoked on a collection object.