WiredTiger recently extracted data from a MongoDB internal collection and edited it manually to restore the database to a functional state. Since for MongoDB, the values stored in WiredTiger files are BSON data - we needed to get the binary bytes out from the file - interpret it as BSON, reflect it in a human-readable form, then edit as we needed, and get the binary bytes out to be restored into the WiredTiger file.

I am creating this ticket to document how we interpreted the BSON from the binary data, and modified it. Also, we can write some tooling to make it easier for more teams/support to do.

Eventually, together with the wt utility, the goal is to make it easier to manipulate MongoDB database for support and investigation.