I have a lot of object with language code as a key field. Since both Java and Mongodb use UTF-8 natively and since the language codes are ASCII it seems to be that they should take 1 byte per character plus the \0 terminator. So the language code "en" should take only 3 bytes in the BSON object and in the index.
Is this correct? I am wondering whether I save anything by converting my fields to a byte array like:
byte[] lcBytes = langCode.getBytes("ISO-8859-1");
before saving them to Mongodb with the Java driver?