BSON works for me so long as Maria is happy to pass BSON texts as strings.
When I was reading the BSON spec I just had to laugh. Douglas Crockford often talk about a bug he made in JSON reference library:
Hi,
I suggest creating an MDEV spec for COLUMN_BSON() to return BSON data which can handle binary (MongoDB uses it to store binary data). In the same MDEV, COLUMN_JSON should be modified to omit binary columns and return a warning to use COLUMN_BSON for a complete representation of the data.
Does that sound reasonable?
--Justin